Throughout the four-story CALIT2 Building – and the institute’s history on the UCI campus, for that matter – runs a recurring and very active mandate: develop and integrate communication and information technology into devices and applications for improving the ways we live, work, play, and care for ourselves and others.
On the first floor, researchers design and manufacture sensors and electronics in state-of-the-art cleanrooms, as well as examine their properties in the advanced materials characterization labs; while one floor up, students drop in to the Microsemi Lab to prototype integrated systems for applications, and the Evoke Lab to build ethical values into technology applications.
In the third-floor eHealth Collaboratory, toys and musical devices instrumented with embedded sensors help children with autism interact with each other and with their parents. Down the hall is the Center for Networks and Relational Analysis, where researchers examine networks from a variety of differing domains.
And on the building’s fourth floor, in the CalPlug Center, researchers are developing user-friendly home energy-monitoring systems. Next door is the Data Engineering ThinkTank. The state-of-the-art, high-performance computer lab provides access to distributed computing resources, collaboration tools, visualization software and a brand-new class of hardware designed expressly for accelerating UCI research, utilizing artificial intelligence and deep machine learning.
From concept to bench to deployment, CALIT2 at UCI offers users an innovation pipeline. The building’s shared-use labs and equipment enable research teams to design, fabricate, characterize, test and deploy their work. The research emphasis is multidisciplinary, offering faculty support for collaborating with those outside their own area of expertise. Research is geared toward seeking innovative information technology approaches that will benefit society and ignite economic development in the state and the nation.
CALIT2 continues to invest in the development of cutting-edge technologies that can enable advances across multiple sectors and industries. Building on past successes, the institute continues to develop ‘living laboratories’ and research spaces to house multidisciplinary collaborations – ensuring that the breadth and crosscutting nature of CALIT2’s research teams will result in new technologies, systems and expertise that are consistent with the institute’s successes to date.
