October 28, 2019 –
More than two dozen research groups, faculty affiliates and startups currently housed at CALIT2 participated in an “all hands” town hall-style meeting, Thursday, Oct. 24. Participants introduced themselves, spoke about their projects and discussed how their teams could collaborate and contribute to ongoing research at the facility.
G.P. Li, CALIT2 Irvine director, welcomed members of the building’s community and reviewed the history and milestones of the facility.
“In 2010, at the end of CALIT2’s first 10 years, the institute embarked on a strategic visioning process to identify focus areas on which to base future investments of time and personnel. Two years later, the process narrowed the list to four application areas: health, culture, energy and the environment,” Li said. “The strategy for focusing on the digital transformation of these areas is to develop technological and institutional innovations using CALIT2’s unique laboratories, technical staff and research spaces. These capabilities facilitate the formation of cross-disciplinary teams of internal and external partners who can successfully compete for funding and produce impactful accomplishments that have broad societal applications.”
One of the most-cited forms of engagement unique to CALIT2 is its shared-use facilities, Li said. Of the 244 faculty affiliated with the institute, nearly 100 regularly utilize the building’s advanced resources. “The clean rooms, microscopy and materials characterization labs and makerspaces lower the barrier for researchers to access state-of-the-art tools for innovative solutions,” he added.
Li listed an array of benefits available to faculty affiliates, including infrastructure and technical services, such as proof-of-concept support, fast prototyping and system-integration assistance, as well as opportunities to leverage CALIT2 lab space and matching fund support to secure large federally funded research instrumentation awards.
Faculty and campus entrepreneurs seeking to launch companies have capitalized on CALIT2’s TechPortal, a pre-incubator that houses and assists young startups still in the process of formulating business plans, developing prototypes, establishing a team, soliciting investments and preparing for market readiness.
“The future will be here sooner than we think,” Li reminded the audience. “And CALIT2 will be leading the way through convergence of research into human health, sustainable energy, environmental sciences and the cultural systems that bind us all together.”
He continued: “Two central drivers unite these four research pillars: the high-performance computing/intelligent sensing nexus that is at the heart of the data revolution; an increased understanding of complex system dynamics, which provides the context through which accurate data models can be engineered and deployed, serving as intelligence at the edges of the blossoming Internet of Everything.“ To help further this objective, CALIT2 provides hosting support for faculty to house research servers and/or utilize the building’s high-speed fiber optics.
Pramod Khargonekar, UC Irvine vice chancellor for research and a Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering & computer science, joined the meeting via teleconference. ”CALIT2 is an enormous asset to UCI,” Khargonekar said. “I look at these assets and encourage you to think what can we do to create major research projects for UCI.”
Following the opening remarks, dozens of cross-disciplinary teams of CALIT2 researchers, faculty and startups working within CALIT2 presented brief overviews of their projects. Presentations, including presenters’ locations in the building, are included below.
Presenter, Chia-Hung Lee, Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering
Peter John Burke, Professor
Bio-nanotechnology Group – Rm. 3300
Carter T. Butts, Professor
Networks, Computation, and Social Dynamics Lab – Rm. 3301
Presenter, Melissa Khy, Operations Manager
Peter D. Chang, MD | Daniel S. Chow, MD
Center for Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostic Medicine (CAIDM) – Rm.4500
Richard Donovan, Lab Director
Data Engineering ThinkTank! – Rm.4500
Calit2 User Facility for Advanced Computing
Franco De Flaviis, Professor
Franco De Flaviis Research Group – Rm. 3300
Brian Demsky, Professor
Programming Languages Research Group – Rm. 4300
Benjamin Dolan, Technical Director
FabWorks – Rm. 2302
Design and fabrication user-space
Sergio Gago, Assistant Professor
ETAD (Engaging Technology Application & Design) – Rm. 3100
Tryphon T.Georgiou, Professor
Tryphon T. Georgiou Research Group – Rm. 3100
Alon A. Gorodetsky, Professor
Gorodetsky Group: Laboratory for Cephalopod-Inspired Materials – Rm. 1305 and 1309
Ian G. Harris, Professor
Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute (CPRI) – Rm. 4414
Michelle Khine, Professor
Khine Lab (Biomedical Engineering) – Rm. 3100
Michael Klopfer, Technical Director
Microsemi Innovation Lab – Rm. 21402
Shared-use design and development space
Abe Lee, Professor
Biomolecular Microsystems & NanoTransducers (BioMiNT) Lab – Rm. 3300
G.P. Li, Professor
Director, CALIT2 UC Irvine – Rm. 4110
Aditi Majumder, Professor
Visualization Group – Rm. 2301
Mimi Ito, Professor
Connected Learning Lab – Rm. 2100A
Presenter, Derek C. Monroe, Ph.D., Kinesiology
Steven L. Small, Professor
Sports & Exercise Neuroscience Laboratory – Rm. 3300
Presenter, Xingxu Yan, Research Group Member
Xiaoqing Pan, Professor
Pan Research Group – Rm. 1302
Kylie Peppler, Professor
Creativity Labs – Rm. 2100A
Joy Pixley, Research Director
California Plug Load Research Center (CalPlug) – Rm. 4300
David Reinkensmeyer, Professor
iMove Collaboratory – Rm. 2402
Presenter, Sina Askari, Graduate Research Assistant
Andrei M. Shkel, Professor
MicroSystems Laboratory – Rm. 3300
Ryan Smith, Facilities Manager
CALIT2 Building – Rm. 4100
Presenter, Seohyun Shim, Research Group Member
William C.Tang, Professor
Microbiomechanics Laboratory – Rm. 3300
Theresa Jean Tanenbaum, Professor
Transformative Play Lab – Rm. 2100
Bill Tomlinson | Rebecca W. Black, Professors
Greening through IT Lab and Rebecca Black’s Lab – Rm. 2006
Albert F. Yee, Professor
A.F. Yee Group – Rm. 3300
– Sharon Henry
