Mentors

Prof. S. Shankar Sastry is the Director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), in the University of California, and is NEC Distinguished Professor, and former Chairman, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Berkeley (2001-04). In 2000-01, he was Director of the Information Technology Office (now divided into IXO and IPTO) at DARPA. He is one of the directors of the Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems (Chess) at UC Berkeley.

His areas of research are networked, embedded and autonomous software, computer vision, control of adaptive, nonlinear and hybrid systems. He has coauthored over 350 technical papers and 9 books.

Dr. Sastry was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 "for pioneering contributions to the design of hybrid and embedded systems." He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS) in 2004. He also received the President of India Gold Medal in 1977, the IBM Faculty Development award for 1983-1985, the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and the Eckman Award of the of the American Automatic Control Council in 1990, an M. A. (honoris causa) from Harvard in 1994, Fellow of the IEEE in 1994, the distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology in 1999, and the David Marr prize for the best paper at the International Conference in Computer Vision in 1999.

For pioneering researcher Ruzena Bajcsy, fostering cutting-edge technology to improve people's lives is a noble challenge. Dr. Bajcsy took the helm at CITRIS in November 2001, after devoting more than 30 years of her life to research in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence and machine perception.

Bajcsy's credentials reach across the traditionally discrete fields of neuroscience, applied mechanics and computer science. She is a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, a distinction few people can match.

Mike Eklund is a visiting postdoctoral school in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley and a CITRIS Researcher. His main project with CITRIS is in Healthcare Information Technology and is leading the Information Technology for Assisted Living (ITALH) project which is a collaborative project with the Tampere University of Technology and Aarhus University, with a proposed collaboration with the Helsinki University of Technology, in which intelligent wireless sensor systems are being investigated to provide assistance to elderly and other people with need of in home care. Dr Eklund received his PhD from Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, and will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Ontatio Institute of Technology in Oshawa, Canada in the Fall of 2006.