Calit2 Strategic Plan September 7, 2015 Submitted by: Larry Smarr, Director Calit2 Ramesh Rao, Director Qualcomm Institute, the UCSD Division of Calit2 G.P. Li, Director of the UCI Division of Calit2 In Response to the Report of the UCOP PRG (12/9/2013) and the Letter from UCOP VPR Bill Tucker (3/9/2013)
Context:
The Portfolio Review Group (PRG) Report (12/19/2013) states, “The committee found that there is unrealized potential to increase the system-wide value and impact of the Institutes by expanding research engagement, collaboration, and participation both between each Institute’s host campuses and beyond the host campuses.” Thae PRG formalized this in one of their three recommendations: “Recommendation 2: Each Institute should develop a plan for increasing system-wide research engagement, collaboration, and participation wherever possible, advantageous, and appropriate.” Furthermore, in Recommendation 3, the PRG seeks “advice regarding future evolution of the Institutes as a whole and opportunities for inter-Institute collaboration and synergy.” On March 9, 2015 Bill Tucker, Interim Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, wrote Calit2 director Smarr a letter in which after quoting the PRG recommendation, he said: “I am writing to ask if Calit2 already has a plan that would satisfy the PRG’s recommendation, and if so, request that you share this plan. If not, I ask for your help in developing a strategic plan that will address this recommendation. Your strategic plan should include both measurable goals and a timeline for implementation that can be communicated to the Academic Senate and campus leadership.” UCOP VPR Tucker asked for a draft strategic plan by September 7, 2015. This document is Calit2’s response to that request. In summary, we report that Calit2 has had a formal Strategic Plan for this decade, formulated in 2009 and begun in 2010. This plan was reported to UCOP in our Calit2 2011 Academic Review Report, submitted August 31, 2011. Calit2 is five years into executing this Strategic Plan and has five years to go. However, this Strategic Plan did not include the PRG recommendation 2, since this was not required by UCOP before the PRG. On receipt of the PRG report in December 2013, Calit2 immediately began to formulate an ambitious plan to engage ALL UC campuses, which has culminated in the NSF funding the Pacific Research Platform (PRP) in July 2015. The PRP represents a new collaboration between two of the GDISIs - Calit2 and CITRIS. It explicitly engages all of the UC and UCOP members of the Information Technology Leadership Council, as well as dozens of leading research faculty from all ten UC campuses. In order to be funded, the plan required detailed measurable goals and a timeline for implementation, so we believe that the March 9, 2015 request of the UCOP VPR is met. In addition, we update in this report on new initiatives within our Strategic Plan and expansion of our innovation transfer to the economy of California.
Outline of the Calit2 Report: Calit2 is five years into our second decade strategic plan, which covers 2010-2020. During this five years we have made much progress, most of which has been covered in numerous articles on the Calit2 web sites [www.calit2.net and www.calit2.uci.edu] and the hard copy Interface quarterly publication from Calit2@UCI. Therefore, in this report we will discuss new initiatives for the second five years of this decade’s strategic plan, with a particular focus on the recommendations of the PRG on “developing a plan for increasing system-wide research engagement, collaboration, and participation wherever possible, advantageous, and appropriate.” Topics Covered in our Strategic Plan for 2015-2020: ● The 2010-2020 Calit2 Strategic Plan ● Emerging Calit2 Research Initiatives ● Bringing the Pacific Research Platform to ALL UC Campuses ● Expanding Collaborations Among the GDISI ● Bringing UC Riverside into the Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation ● Collaborations with UC Campuses Beyond UCSD and UCI ● Use of Specialized Facilities by UC Campuses Beyond UCSD and UCI ● Expanding our Innovation Transfer Programs
The 2010-2020 Calit2 Strategic Plan As described in the Calit2 ten year academic review report (submitted Aug 31, 2011), in 2009 Calit2 commenced a strategic planning process to produce a new vision for our second decade, based on all we had built up in the first decade and informed by the external changes in technology and society that had occurred during this time.This process resulted in 2010 with a new, shared two-campus Calit2 vision for the coming decade, which we are half way through. As can be seen in the following illustration, we are focused on the digital transformation of Health, Energy, Environment, and Culture, driven by continuing disruptive evolutions of the underlying enabling technologies of cyberinfrastructure, nano-MEMS, photonics, and wireless. In our deliberations, we sought out the “sweet spots” for Calit2 to carry out multidisciplinary research and education in our “Living Laboratories.” In this process we continually came back to how this can help California’s economy and improve its citizens quality of life, while engaging industry, and our regional communities. The resulting innovations should have wide effect on the US and internationally.
For a detailed explanation of Calit2’s 2010-2020 Strategic Plan, see the Calit2 10-year review.
Emerging Research Initiatives for 2015-2020: We are in the process of putting in place a number of new initiatives for the next five years, which are natural evolutions from our overall strategic plan described earlier. We give a brief description of each one, why it is being developed now, and explain how it engages the private sector. In some cases, the initiative is still being developed on one of our two campuses, in some both campuses are involved, and in some other UC campuses are being engaged (covered in the Outreach to Other UC Campuses below). ● Decoding our Microbial Planet ○ With Rob Knight joining UCSD in January 2015, bringing 25 members of the Knight Lab from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Calit2’s pioneering efforts in understanding both environmental microbiomes [the CAMERA project] and the human microbiome [Quantified Self project] moved to an entirely new level. Major projects are underway, in collaboration with the Knight Lab, other UCSD/UCI researchers, and national partners to greatly expand our efforts to use genome sequencing to decode the dynamic microbiomes that are so essential to our planet’s environment and to human’s state of wellness or disease. Illumina is a major private sector partner in this effort. The UCI 3rd annual Symposium on Microbiome Connections to the Environment and Health will be held September 25, 2015 and planning is underway for next year’s Symposium. ● Expanding Wireless Sensornets Amplified by Drones ○ In parallel with the first 15 years of Calit2, the NSF-funded High Performance Wireless and Research Network (HPWREN) was built out to cover San Diego and Imperial Counties by PI Hans-Werner Braun and co-PI Frank Vernon . HPWREN is the most extensive high performance (up to 155 Mbps) wireless environmental sensornet in the United States. It has been the backbone of Calit2’s decade-long engagement with wildfire first responders. Earlier in 2015, Hans-Werner Braun stepped down as PI, turning the reins over to Frank Vernon, who is actively exploring expansions and federations of HPWREN with Orange and Riverside counties (anchored at UCI and UCR) and with the University of Nevada at Reno AlertTahoe net). We are investigating the use of airborne drones to extend these sensornets with our industrial partner SDG&E, particularly for wildfire early alert and situational awareness. Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute has been building and deploying drones for several years and recently has developed techniques for inexpensive 3D printing of complete drones. ● Pattern Recognition Laboratory ○ After 60+ years of von Neumann architectures, we are seeing a rapid development of a variety of non-VN architectures, which are ideal for pattern recognition. The best known is the IBM TrueNorth neuromorphic CMOS chip, described in the cover story for Science August 8, 2014. The lead for the TrueNorth chip and the director of IBM’s Cognitive Computing division Dharmendra Modha, is a PhD graduate of UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering and has had active engagement with UCSD. In parallel, Dan Goldin, the longest serving NASA Administrator, returned to San Diego and founded the Intellisis Corporation in 2005. He enlisted technical staff in Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute to
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help Intellisis design a novel non-VN processor that bridges neuroscience, engineering, and physics. Finally, Qualcomm has been developing neuromorphic processors for smartphones and robots. Both IBM and Intellisis will be providing boards to Calit2 this Fall and discussions are underway with Qualcomm. Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute will develop a new Pattern Recognition Laboratory to house these non-VN processors. Meanwhile, we are actively engaging researchers in machine learning (such as the SDSC’s Predictive Analytics Center of Excellence and the global leaders in machine learning that attend the annual Calit2 Information Theory and its Applications workshop) and in applications (such as in Professor Todd Coleman’s Neural Interaction Laboratory) to develop software for these processors. Ultimately, these new non-VN processors will be used by Calit2 researchers to analyze sensornet data streams and massive biomedical databases. Contextual Robotics ○ UCSD's Contextual Robotics Institute will be housed in Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute Atkinson Hall. Numerous faculty from engineering, cognitive sciences, surgery and Scripps Institution of Oceanography are involved. An early new hire Michael Yip is an expert in flexible robots with applications to surgery. Design Lab ○ In 2014 UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla convinced Don Norman to return to UCSD where he co-founded the Design Lab in Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute with Cognitive Science Professors Scott Klemmer and Jim Hollan. The Design Lab is using its innovative philosophy of Thinking, Observing, and Making (TOM) with a variety of private sector partners, including Nissan. Make Labs ○ With funding from the Kay Family Foundation, Calit2@UCI opened FABWorks in February 2015. Located on the building’s second floor, the 2,100-sq.-ft. makerspace is equipped with prosumer grade equipment: 3D printers and scanners, networked computer controlled milling machines, laser cutters, electronics development and diagnostics equipment, industrial sewing machines and more. The FABWorks space offers expanded opportunities for those interested in hands-on advanced manufacturing experience, and creates a hub where creativity can propel next-generation technologies. The space is open to an external community, including users from any UC or Cal State campus. ○ In fall of 2015, Calit2@UCI will launch the Microsemi Innovation Lab on the building’s second floor. The lab is fully equipped and supported by Microsemi Inc. and offers users access to state-of-the-art low power semiconductor microelectronics, encrypted communication and system solution technologies for advanced prototyping and proof-of-concept work. Internet of Things (IoT) ○ In 2014 UCI positioned Calit2 as a hub of IoT-related efforts. The institute has forged numerous partnerships with industry not only to identify new applications and market opportunities, but also to research and develop hardware and software solutions for serving industry. .
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Irvine Materials Research Institute ○ In 2014, the UCI campus successfully recruited Dr. Xiaoqing Pan, an internationally recognized researcher in material sciences. Professor Pan is leading a $20 million initiative to establish the Irvine Materials Research Institute (IMRI) which will house a world-class electron microscopy and materials science research facility on the first floor of the Calit2 Building, as well as building out of shell space in the building’s second floor. This will greatly expand Calit2@UCI’s current Laboratory for Electron and X-ray Instrumentation (LEXI) material characterization and microscopy facility. This enlarged facility will give Calit2 a leading role in the use of Transmission Electron Microscopy and will be open to industrial and academic partners. California Plug Load Research Center ○ With funding support from the California Energy Commission, UCI opened the CalPlug center on the fourth floor of the Calit2 Building in fall 2011. CalPlug focuses on energy efficiency solutions, efficiency evaluations of consumer electronics, standards development, education and public outreach, and user behavior studies. CalPlug has nearly a dozen membership companies and an advisory board comprised of industry, government, utilities and advocacy group representatives. CalPlug will address challenges in plug load efficiency for both residential and commercial buildings by collaborating closely with utilities, manufacturers, service providers, advocacy groups, research institutions, and energy policy makers. Through collaborations with research institutes and manufacturers, the center will assist in developing future appliance efficiency standards and incentives for manufacturers and retailers.
Bringing the Pacific Research Platform to ALL UC Campuses Immediately after receiving the UCOP PRG report in January 2014, Calit2 director Smarr began to formulate a PRG response plan based on creating a UC-wide end-to-end Big Data cyberinfrastructure. It was natural given our Institute’s name that Calit2 would choose to outreach to all UC campuses using information technology and telecommunications. Furthermore, Calit2 had provided national leadership in the use of optical networks for 13 years, with director Smarr being PI of the NSF-funded OptIPuter grant (2002-2009), and co-PI of the NSF-funded campus-scale optical network Quartzite (2004-2007) and Prism@UCSD (20132015) grants. The problem to be solved is that many research disciplines are increasingly multi-investigator and multi-institutional, and need ever more rapid access to their ultra-large heterogeneous and widely distributed datasets The commodity Internet that provides interactive access for email and web services to our students, faculty, and staff has been engineered to support megabyte (MB) size objects. In contrast, data-driven university research deals in data objects measured in gigabytes (GB) or terabytes (TB), 1000 or 1 million times larger, respectively. Clearly, these cannot be moved with any speed over the normal Internet. What is needed is a new transport system, parallel but distinct from the commodity Internet, that establishes a science-driven highcapacity end-to-end regional-scale “Big Data Freeway System.”
Calit2 has been involved, often collaborating with the other GDISI, in efforts to solve this problem almost since Calit2’s birth. In 2002 Smarr led one of the largest computer science research projects funded by NSF in the first decade of the 2000s - the OptIPuter. The idea of the OptIPuter project was to use the property of optical fibers that they can support data transfer rates of over a million megabits/sec. Therefore, one should be able to demonstrate that one could make the wide-area optical fiber bandwidth as fast or faster than the backplane of a local cluster, thus effectively eliminating distance between remote computers or data repositories. Building on the newly funded OptIPuter grant, in 2002, the directors of Calit2 (Larry Smarr) and CITRIS (Ruzena Bajcsy) drove an effort to create within CENIC a new California Optical Research and Experimental Network Laboratory (CalREN-XD), based on the recently awarded NSF OptIPuter proposal. This white paper involved all four GDISI and led to a NorCal and SoCal workshop on the applications and engineering of CalREN-XD, as well as a proposal to UCOP to fund it. Ultimately, the proposal was not funded, but the effort did lead CENIC to establish a version of CalREN-XD, although without the direct engagement of the GDISI. In 2005, Smarr and SDSC director Fran Berman developed the notion of using the four GDISIs as campus interfaces, to use CENIC’s backbone to link all the campuses to the then NSF TeraGrid, the network of all NSF supercomputer centers. In 2008, Smarr keynoted the TeraGrid annual meeting with a detailed plan for connecting campus end-users to national supercomputer centers. Again, the concept was not implemented. What continued to be a major barrier to implementation of this Big Data Freeway System was that the campus networks continued to use the commodity low-bandwidth Internet and were therefore bottlenecks to the end user. The irony was that the local bandwidth on the campuses was orders of magnitude slower than the wide-area bandwidth between the campuses. In response to this challenge, the Department of Energy’s ESnet, based out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), has developed the “Science DMZ” model, which NSF has funded, through its CC-NIE program, on over 100 U.S. campuses during the last 3 years (including seven of the ten UC campuses). Essentially, a campus Science DMZ helps address common network performance problems encountered at research institutions by creating a network architecture designed for high-performance applications, where the data science network is distinct from the commodity shared Internet. Building on DOEs innovative DMZ concept as the “missing link,” in May 2014, Smarr reached out to all the UC campuses and UCOP information technology officers by giving an invited presentation to the UC Information Technology Leadership Council (ITLC) May 19, 2014. There was unanimous enthusiasm for proceeding with the idea. During the second half of 2014, Calit2 director Smarr, who serves on the DOE ESnet Policy Board, worked closely with the ESnet director and his top staff, to better understand how Calit2 could help organize a major technology innovation transfer from the DOE Labs to the UC campuses. Simply put, DOE had demonstrated the ability to couple Lab DMZs over the ESnet 100 Gigabit per second (Gbps) backbone network. Could something similar be done with the UC campuses, many of which had already received NSF CC-NIE campus DMZ grants and whose campus gateways were
already connected by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) 100Gbps backbone?
The PRP Partners are connected by CENIC’s 100Gbps and 10Gbps infrastructure as shown. CENIC is connected to DOE’s ESnet and Internet2, as well as Pacific Wave, all at 100Gbps
Calit2 director Smarr explored this with all of the CENIC members and leadership at the annual CENIC retreat in July 2014. Again there was unanimous support for moving forward. Through collaboration with CENIC the concept of connecting West coast research campuses using CENIC (and its extension to Washington State called Pacific Wave) became named the Pacific Research Platform (PRP) by December, 2014. Following a meeting at Stanford that month, the network engineers of many of the UC campuses, plus Caltech, USC, Stanford, and the University of Washington, agreed to carry out a proof-of-principle demonstration of the PRPv0 for the annual CENIC conference in March 2015, held at UC Irvine. Disk-to-disk dataset transfers of large datasets from inside of one campus DMZ to inside of another campus DM were achieved at speeds of 9.6Gbps out of 10Gbps (e.g., UCB, UCI, UCD, & UCSC to UCSD) and 36Gbps out of 40Gbps (UCLA & Caltech to UCSD). To put into perspective what a major
jump in capability for UC this is, consider that before PRP a 100GB dataset took 3 hours to transfer between campuses over the commodity Internet, while our PRP-optimized test moved 1600GB in 4 minutes! In parallel, Calit2 director Smarr developed a proposal as a response to NSF’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure - Data, Networking, and Innovation (CC*DNI) solicitation and submitted the PRP proposal to NSF on March 24, 2015. Calit2 director Smarr serves as PI, CITRIS deputy director Crittenden is co-PI, joined by QI’s Tom DeFanti, SDSC’s Phil Papadopoulos, and UCSD Physicist Frank Wuerthwein. This proposal, which will be forwarded to the UCOP VPR as part of this response, engages all UC ITLC leaders (all of whom signed letters of commitment), along with dozens of leading scientists from all ten campuses, whose applications across campuses are the primary drivers of the PRP. The proposal was awarded on July 30, 2015 with a grant start date of Oct, 1, 2015. The NSF proposal will provide $1,000,000 a year for five years to fund building out the PRP, enabling the chosen science application teams to demonstrate their enhanced productivity. UCOP provided Calit2 $200,000 in “momentum maintaining” funds April 30, 2015, a month after the full PRP proposal was submitted to NSF, to push the PRP out to all ten UC campuses by providing equipment and technical support prior to the NSF award start. Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute (QI) staff had developed a modestly-priced ($5-20,000) Science DMZ Data Transfer Node (DTN) under the previous Prism@UCSD NSF CC-NIE award. These are standardized Big Data PCs we call Flash I/O Network Appliances (FIONAs) that QI constructs out of commodity parts, but they are highly optimized for data-centric applications, acting as DMZ “data supercapacitors” for the Science Teams. QI’s John Graham built in August and is deploying in September perfSONAR and FIONA computers to all 10 UC campuses, upgrading some early Calit2-supplied FIONAs from the March CENIC demo versions to the new standard, and sending new machines to the rest of the campuses that did not participate in March. The PRP campus-based network engineers are accumulating baseline tests Statewide, and to Seattle, Chicago, and Amsterdam as partner machines are installed. Visualizations of connectivity, packet loss, and file transfer (using GridFTP) are publicly available. The PRP Science Teams include researchers from all ten UC campuses (bolded): ● Particle Physics Data Analysis ○ UCSD: A.Yagil, F. Würthwein (team leader); UCI: A. Lankford, A. Taffard, D. Whiteson; UCSC: A. Seiden, J. Nielsen, B. Schumm; UC Davis: M. Chertok, J. Conway, R. Erbacher, M. Mulhearn, M. Tripathi; UCSB: C. Campagnari; UCR: R. Clare, O. Long, S. Wimpenny; Caltech: H. Newman; ● Astronomy and Astrophysics Data Analysis ○ Telescope Surveys: LBNL: Peter Nugent; UCD: Tony Tyson; Caltech/IPAC/JPL, UCB, Stanford/ SLAC, UCI, UCSC, UW. ○ Galaxy Evolution: UCI: CGE, director James Bullock; UCSC: AGORA, directors Joel Primack & Piero Madau. ○ Gravitational Wave Astronomy: Caltech: David Reitze, Executive Director, LIGO Laboratory; UCSD: Frank Würthwein.
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Biomedical Data Analysis ○ Cancer Genomics Hub/Browser: UCSC: David Haussler, Brad Smith ○ Microbiome and Integrative ‘Omics: UCSD: Rob Knight, Larry Smarr; UCD: David Mills, Carlito Labrilla; Caltech: Sarkis Mazmanian; UCSF: Sergio Baranzini. ○ Integrative Structural Biology: UCSF: Andrej Sali Earth Sciences Data Analysis ○ Data Analysis and Simulation for Earthquakes and Natural Disasters: UCB: Steve Mahin, with UCSD, UCD, UCLA, UCI, USC, Stanford, OSU, and UW. Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) ○ Climate Modeling: NCAR/UCAR: Anke Kamrath, Marla Meehl. ○ California/Nevada Regional Climate: UCSD/SIO: Dan Cayan ○ CO2 Subsurface Modeling: SDSU: Christopher Paolini and Jose Castillo Scalable Visualization, Virtual Reality, and Ultra-Resolution Video UCSD: Tom DeFanti, Falko Kuester, Tom Levy, Jurgen Schulze; UIC: Maxine Brown; UHM, Jason Leigh; UCD: Louise Kellogg; UCI: Magda El Zarki, Walt Scacchi; UCM, Marcelo Kallmann, Nicola Lercari; UvA: Cees de Laat.
The details of the research that the application teams will carry out and how PRP will transform their current approach using the shared Internet, is contained in the NSF proposal, which is being made available to the UCOP VPR as part of this report. Currently, the PRP is a partnership of more than 20 institutions, including four NSF/DOE/NASA supercomputer centers and is being extended to international partners in the Netherlands, Japan, Korea, and Australia. NSF separately awarded Calit2 director Smarr a $48,543 grant to hold the first PRP participants Workshop on October 14-16, 2015 at Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute and SDSC The PRP has already received national attention with a NY Times article appearing just a few days after the grant was announced. The Daily Californian featured UCB’s contributions. The Australian covered their country’s research and education network (AARnet) joining the PPR. Both the PRP award and the AARnet partnership were covered on the Calit2 website. In summary, the PRP will extend the campus Science DMZ model to a regional model for dataintensive networking, enabling researchers to move data to/from their labs and their collaborators’ sites, supercomputer centers or data repositories, enabling the data to traverse multiple, heterogeneous networks without performance degradation. The PRP’s data sharing architecture, with end-to-end 10-100Gb/s connections, will enable region-wide virtual co-location of data with computing. The second generation PRP will be an advanced IPv6-enabled version with robust security and software-defined networking features. The ensemble of PRP technologies is designed to be extensible across other scientific domains and to other regional and national networks. Expanding Collaborations Among the GDISI In developing the Pacific Research Platform, the PI (director of Calit2) asked CITRIS to be a coorganizer of the PRP, thereby making use of the existing strong relationships already
established among six of the ten UC campuses: Calit2 (UCSD, UCI) and CITRIS (UCB, UCD, UCM, UCSC). After the announcement of the NSF PRP Award, both CNSI and QB3 have expressed interest in collaborating with the PRP. Again, this is natural since UCSC’s David Haussler is the QB3 Campus Leader and since director Smarr has worked with CNSI@UCSB on campus cyberinfrastructure before. Building on the earlier work in which the four GDISI came together around the prescient CalREN-XD proposal in 2002, this provides a worked example of nearly 15 years in which the collaboration of the four Institutes had lead to California having a national leadership role in the next generation of high performance cyberinfrastructure to support a myriad of emerging Big Data research areas across the ten campuses and beyond. Nothing symbolizes this increasing spirit of collaboration among the GDISIS as well as the current CITRIS website with a image of Smarr in front of Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute VROOM tiled wall to illustrate the PRP Calit2/CITRIS story.
CITRIS website September 7, 2015 Bringing UC Riverside into the Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation UC Riverside was the one UC campus which was not part of one of the four GDISI, when they were founded in 2000. In the last year, UCR’s Vice Chancellor for Research Michael Pazzani has been discussing the possibility of joining Calit2 as a third campus. In June 2015, VCR Pazzani addressed the Calit2 Advisory Board on this possibility and the Board voted unanimously for Calit2 to pursue the potential opportunity to determine if it can be accomplished. Since there is no historical precedence for adding a campus to the GDISIs, Calit2 is investigating the appropriate process by which this might happen. Discussions have occurred between the UCSD, UCI, and UCSD VCRs. Next steps would involve similar discussions among the Executive Vice Chancellors and finally the Chancellors. UCOP will also need to become part of these discussions. The role of the campus Senates and central Senate is not yet clear in this process.
Collaborations with UC Campuses Beyond UCSD and UCI Calit2 has always reached out to other UC campuses for collaborations when appropriate. We list here a few current and future examples. ● Scientific Research Applications Enabled by the Pacific Research Platform. In addition to the new cyberinfrastructure collaboration with all ten UC campuses, the PRP is bringing Calit2 into a series of new scientific collaborations listed in the section above. For instance, the Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution has recently been defunded by UCOP. Calit2 is working with them to move their galaxy simulation data to the UCI and UCR machine rooms and establish high speed links to their collaborators at UCSB and UCLA, so that collaborative multi-campus research can continue. As another example, recently Calit2’s QI had collaborated with UCM on virtual reality technology leading to the adoption by UC Merced of the 4KAVE system developed by Calit2’s QI. ● A UC Testbed to Develop a National Model for Wireless Spectrum Sharing. Since 2012, the federal government has made it clear through presidential memorandums, official reports, and public workshops that clearing and reallocating federal spectrum is no longer a sustainable basis for spectrum policy and that developing and testing technologies for spectrum sharing is of national concern. Although dynamic sharing of spectrum (allowing commercial entities to share access to spectrum owned by federal agencies) has been proposed as the best way to increase spectrum capabilities and maximize limited airwaves, viable plans for testing this possibility through wireless “model cities” have been slow to materialize because of the complicated practical and political logistics involved. The University of California could take national leadership by using its 10 campuses as small “model cities.” Calit2’s QI and UCSD faculty are actively exploring the feasibility of setting up such a UC-wide consortium testbed. Significantly, through a single initiative, testing could take place in multiple geographic locations across the state from rural (UC Davis) and urban (UCLA) settings to coastal (UC San Diego) and desert (UC Riverside) venues, providing the scope necessary for meaningful and effective results. Once established, the UC spectrum testing initiative could be opened up to include the many other academic institutions, industry leaders, municipal partners, and business startups who have already expressed an interest in participating in spectrum sharing research, creating a vast network of model test sites that will be able to capture a truly representative sampling of American wireless needs. ● Internet of Things and Smart Manufacturing. In collaboration with an UCLA advanced manufacturing-based consortium (SMLC), Calit2@UCI is developing a Smart Worker training platform for energy efficiency and sustainable advanced manufacturing program based on IoT capabilities. ● Robotic surgery. Calit2 has been in discussions with Professor Ken Goldberg at Berkeley who is involved with the CITRIS People and Robots initiative. UCSD Professor Yip and Dr. Goldberg are poised to network their da Vinci robots to test new model free navigation algorithms in vivo at UCSD's Center for the Future of Surgery. Visual Arts professor Benjamin Bratton, a QI affiliate, adds critical perspectives on Social robotics. ● Jupyter Hub and Electronic Notebooks. Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute has been deeply collaborating with UCB and LBNL on establishing a NorCal/SoCal distributed data analysis software system built on the Jupyter Hub, an open source web based
environment for software and data, supporting over 40 programming languages.QI’s John Graham and director Smarr have both traveled to UCB and had detailed discussions with Fernando Perez, LBNL staff and member of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, who invented iPython and is leading its evolution into the Jupyter Project. Perez and his team have visited QI to study how we have deployed the Jupyter Hub on our scalable visualization clusters and how we will soon deploy it on SDSC’s Comet. We are using the Jupyter electronic notebooks to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text to support UCSD’s Knight Lab for microbiome data analysis and visualization. Use of Specialized Facilities by UC Campuses Beyond UCSD and UCI Calit2 has always had open specialized labs since the buildings were opened ten years ago. We list just a few of the labs that have had UC users beyond UCSD and UCI as illustrative of this broader state-wide usage. ● The QI Photonic Systems Lab has been used by UCLA. ● In addition to UCI and UCSD, the Calit2@UCI Integrated Nanosystems Research Facility (INRF)/Bio-Organic Nanofabrication (BiON) Clean Room facilities and Laboratory for Electron and X-ray Instrumentation (LEXI) material characterization and microscopy facilities are being used by: ○ Five research groups from UC Riverside ○ Four groups from UCLA ○ Two from UC Davis ○ One from UC Berkeley ○ Additional users include: Cal State Long Beach, USC, Chapman U. and Western University of Health Sciences. ● The recent expansion of Irvine Materials Research Institute (IMRI) will establish Calit2@UCI as a major hub for supporting all UC campuses in advanced and bio materials characterization. Expanding our Innovation Transfer Programs Over the last 15 years, Calit2's two campus divisions have had a significant impact on the regional economy, as detailed in our ten-year report submitted to UCOP on Aug 31, 2011. Summarizing and updating these numbers: ● Calit2 has directly worked with over 400 companies and has had interactions with 1,000 more ● The Qualcomm Institute (Calit2 UCSD Division) Nano3 facility has been made use of by over 100 companies (including large companies such as Qualcomm, Oracle, Illumina, Cymer, and General Atomics), while the UCI Division's nano and characterization facilities has been used by over 200 companies (including large companies such as Texas Instrument, Broadcom, Northrop Grumman, Henkel Electronic Materials, Rockwell International). ● Calit2 has helped launch over 40 startups ● In 2006, Calit2@UCI held its first panel presentation, Igniting Technology. The signature event sponsored by Knobbe, Martens, LLP instantly became a semiannual signature
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event at UCI. The program showcases innovative projects that have moved from lab bench to startups. The panels are comprised of innovators, entrepreneurs, IP experts and investors. The Igniting Technology events held every November and May have produced a cult-like following, with an average of 150+ attendees from Southern California. More than 200 small, midsize and large companies have utilized the Calit2@UCI proofof-concept and prototyping facilities. With the opening of two demonstration and design centers in the building (eHealth collaboratory and CalPlug), Irvine has expanded its technical staff and with a newly created industry liaison staff person the institute is aggressively promoting its proof-of-concept services.
Incubation spaces and spreading the culture of innovation transfer ● Calit2@UCI’s TechPortal, a business technology incubator in the UCI Calit2 Building, serves as a gateway to commercial viability for UC-based startup companies. TechPortal has incubated 15 companies since it launched in June 2010. There are currently 6 companies housed in the second floor facility: BioPico Systems, Flint Rehab, Garblecloud, Integra Devices, Neptune Diagnostics and Velox Biosystems. Prior to launching the formal incubator, UCI offered virtual incubation space for two companies: CodaGenomics and Hiperwall Inc. TechPortal offers affordable space, access to facilities and services, and mentoring, programs and expertise to help new companies gain traction in the marketplace. TechPortal can house up to seven companies in its 1460 square feet of space and Calit2 offers the perfect combination of lab space, experts, programs and facilities. Its wet and dry lab spaces provide options for a wide range of startup companies. Companies must be either based on or licensing UC technology, or founded by UC faculty, staff or students, and already incorporated and able to commit to six months of rent. In addition to affordable space and short-term leases, TechPortal benefits include classes, workshops, lectures, networking opportunities and one-on-one advice offered by the Merage School of Business, the Don Beall Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Office of Technology Alliances, OCTANe and UCI Institute for Innovation. ● Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute Innovation Space (QIIS) is a major new effort, officially launched on March 30, 2015, to engage with industry, startups and national laboratories – by opening an Innovation Space for them in the institute’s headquarters building on the UCSD campus. Select partners will be invited to lease space and locate their personnel within the QIIS, offering more proximate opportunities to enable joint research projects between the private and public sector and the campus research community. This space will also help foster collaborative creation of intellectual property (IP) involving University of California (UC) and non-UC personnel – thereby extending the prevailing base of engagement built on IP entirely generated by UC personnel and licensed to other parties. To date 13 partners have signed up for space in QIIS and a number have been on site for months, including: FLE, ComHear, Ram Photonics, Technosylva, Sinopia, Partow Technologies LLC, Alternagen, VirBELLA, SteamEngine, Inc., Breakthrough Genetics LLC, Acrovirt, igrenEnergi, and the Clinical Addiction Recovery Institute.
