[ba-unrev-talk] CITRIS/Bootstrap Alliance & Multivalent Browser as a candidate for a Hyperscope application
CITRIS hopes to tap campus databases to aid research across disciplines
< http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2002/04/24_citrs.html > (01)
In summary, Ruzena Bajcsy, CITRIS director says: (02)
"The new research institute, led by
Berkeley, is currently exploring potential
collaborative projects across a wide range
of disciplines that involve information
technology." (03)
“The information technologies are just a
medium, like Gutenberg’s printing press,
to help us address society’s most pressing
problems,” she says. .... (04)
“We’ve got massive databases now, but we
haven’t built the information processing
systems yet to be able to mine those
databases and extract patterns and trends
in the data,” he said. “Essentially, all
we have right now is noise.” (05)
***********
More for the record: (06)
24 April 2002
"Though databases are growing exponentially, social scientists, urban
planners, architects, anthropologists, economists and linguists are not
yet equipped to mine these vast information reservoirs. But the Center
for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS)
hopes to change that. (07)
The state legislature voted April 15 to fully fund CITRIS and the three
other California Institutes for Science and Innovation, and Gov. Gray
Davis is expected to sign the funding into law. (08)
“This allows us to examine — in a serious fashion — the results of
information technology on people and on society as a whole,” says
Ruzena Bajcsy, CITRIS director, of the legislature’s vote. (09)
The new research institute, led by Berkeley, is currently exploring
potential collaborative projects across a wide range of disciplines that
involve information technology. (010)
“The information technologies are just a medium, like Gutenberg’s
printing press, to help us address society’s most pressing problems,”
she says. (011)
Bajcsy has spent the last few months interviewing campus faculty — from
business, linguistics, political science, health sciences, public
policy, information management and other departments and research units
— with an eye to possible collaborative projects using the large troves
of data already available on campus. (012)
Potential collaborations
The range of potential projects is, in fact, dizzying. Faculty members
in anthropology, each with thousands of slides, could benefit from an
integrated image archive. Meg Conkey, director of the Archaeological
Re-search Facility, said the department would like eventually to put
approximately 80,000 images on a server accessible to everyone in the
department. (013)
With an infusion of CITRIS expertise, she says, the department’s small
teaching lab, called the Class of 1960 Multimedia Authoring Center for
Teaching in Anthropology, could provide a host of services to teach
multimedia and archaeology. (014)
Another CITRIS collaboration could involve “a 3-D model of campus
building occupancy that would tell us how many people are in each
building at any time of the day,” said John Radke, director of the
Geography Information Science Center and an associate professor in the
College of Environmental Design. (015)
And if “smart sensors” were used inside classrooms, in combination with
the 3-D model of building occupancy, “we would have continuous
information about classroom occupancy and be able to respond more
effectively when an earthquake struck or a fire broke out,” he says. (016)
Radke also envisions regional and global applications for the
technology, in urban development, transportation and environmental
conservation. (017)
“We’ve got massive databases now, but we haven’t built the information
processing systems yet to be able to mine those databases and extract
patterns and trends in the data,” he said. “Essentially, all we have
right now is noise.” (018)
CITRIS can change that, Radke says, “bringing together, say, urban
planners with computer scientists to build integrative computer
systems.”" (019)