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Calit2 Director Smarr Discusses Technology Adoption, Key Research, Living Labs, and Relationship with Mexico

7.29.04 -- In an interview for the UCSD CONNECT Newsletter, editor Andrea Siedsma caught up with Calit² director Larry Smarr for an update on the institute's progress. "In just a little over three years," reports Siedsma, "Calit² researchers have made huge strides in transformational technologies like intelligent transportation, homeland security, medical informatics, gaming and the new Internet." Here, she quizzes Smarr about the institute's explosive growth, its influence on the telecom industry and its economic and social impacts on the region and the country:

Q: When the State of California launched Calit² in 2001, these institutes were charged with laying the foundation for the next new economy. What does this new economy entail and how much of an impact will Calit² have on the new economy?

A: California has always been about a "new economy." That means California is constantly innovating technically, economically and socially, and always on the look out for the next big thing. Why is that? It's because disruptive technologies follow an "S-curve" of adoption. That means a new technology goes from the bottom of the curve, where there's a long period of research, and then takes off like we had a year ago with cell phones in the United States. All of a sudden, everybody is doing it. You get a whole bunch of companies, and then there's a shake out. If you look at the growth rate, the steep part of the S-curve, where the rate is the highest, is where California feeds.

Calit² Director Larry Smarr

So, if you'll notice in the last recession, in the 90's, San Diego went south and Silicon Valley didn't have much of a problem. This recession is exactly the opposite. Why would that be? Silicon Valley was about the PC and the wired Internet - Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Dell and AOL. That S-curve started in the early 80's, with the joint advances of the PC and NSFnet, the backbone for the future Internet. The steep part of the S-curve was in the late 80's and through the 90's. One reason there was such a train wreck in the market in the early 2000s was that people mistakenly extrapolated the growth rate they saw in the middle of the S-curve. This logical error naturally led to all these high expectations: People over invested, assuming the growth rate was going to continue forever. In contrast, in the last recession the reason San Diego was going south was that the aerospace and defense sector, which had been ramped up in the 1980's, had a huge contraction because you couldn't keep the growth rate up that the Reagan years had funded to end the Cold War. So we hit a bad spot then the way Silicon Valley is hitting a lower growth rate now with respect to the wired Internet PC market. But southern California is now just at the start of the wireless curve taking off with high growth rates, so we are hit less hard by the recession than the north is.

What makes California's economy vibrant is the state's ability to "surf" a succession of such S-curves. .

California is trying to create in Calit2 and its three sister institutes a permanent institution within the University of California that is looking at the future of key S-curves of science and technology. So that is why we have in one of the Calit² buildings (at UCSD) nanotechnology, computer gaming, wireless networks, and digital cinema. These all represent emerging "S-curves" of growth--there are essentially no theaters with digital cinema and the wireless Internet is just beginning to appear on cell phones. Our job is also to investigate cross-links among these S-curves. For instance, we're using nanotechnology to make nano-sensors to incorporate into integrated systems on chips to link to wireless systems, which send sensor data to databases to which we can then apply large-scale visualization. There are many things that a university can do that are very different from what a company can do.

Q: Currently, what are the most promising areas of research at Calit2?

A: I'll pick three. One is intelligent transportation. Modern automobiles have close to 100 microprocessors, sensors and actuators--all fielded with embedded software. Then, at the same time that's happening, cars are transitioning to cellular wireless with GPS location systems, and, as a result, they can send information to each other, as well as to the street and highway system, about where they are and how fast they are going. So we're looking at a potential "phase transition" from a dumb transportation system to a self-aware transportation system over the next decade. To better understand where that transition could take us, Calit² has assembled several different groups of academic researchers at UC Irvine and UC San Diego that are working on the software systems inside the automobiles, the miniaturization of video cameras and sensors inside of the car, wirelessly connected fleets of cars, and on our dial-up number for real-time traffic information. All these groups are also working with industry. We have all the pieces coming together. Just as the co-evolution of the PC and the Internet led to tens of thousands of companies, I believe that this intelligent transportation system is also going to lead to thousands of niche companies. We want California to be at the center of this coming revolution, just as it has always been identified with the development of the automobile.

Another Calit2 research area is networked gaming. Recently, I read that the region between L.A. and San Diego has come to be called "Joystick Corridor" because it hosts something like 70 gaming companies. In both UC Irvine and UC San Diego, Calit² has strong groups in all aspects of this emerging growth area - narrative structure, computer graphics, computer chip architectures, and heterogeneous gaming in which you're connecting to ongoing multi-player games from cell phones and wireless PDAs. More and more we're creating partnerships with information infrastructure companies like Sun Microsystems, which gave us a grant at UC Irvine to create an infrastructure that supports gaming, in addition to partnering with the companies who write games.

The real frontier is when you have hundreds of thousands of people coming in over the network to a consistent virtual community in which they have roles that they play. There's a lot of research going on to figure out the optimal telecommunications and IT infrastructure to support this kind of heterogeneous gaming. There are lots of issues with servers, efficiency, and linking to wireless net user interfaces. It's like the PC before and after the web. Think about what a vast infrastructure there is to support the web - you have 10,000 PC clusters at places like Google, Microsoft, AOL and other major portals. And then there's all the middleware that is required to make all the parts work together smoothly.

What Calit² likes to do is look at these emerging large-scale systems. That's what academics traditionally have not studied. The way academics traditionally work is they take a complex system and break it down into pieces and dig deeply into one of those pieces, but seldom do they put the pieces back together. No one researcher can do that. It's only when you have this persistent, collaborative framework like Calit² that you can identify key individuals and bring them together into these virtual teams.

Finally, public safety is another research area. It's been three years since Sept. 11 and we haven't had another attack inside the U.S., but we've had earthquakes and floods and horrible firestorms during that time period. So whether the destruction is man-made or natural, these unexpected events all endanger the public. What we're looking at are general systems that enable first responders - the people who are entrusted to work with public safety - to work smarter and more efficiently. We're talking about smart badges that have location awareness; using wireless networks to enable remote video cameras inside dangerous buildings; and situation awareness where a command center can use a display to determine where the first responders are and where the threat is for a fire or toxic fumes, and be able to have contact with the first responders in real time. We have large NSF and NIH grants to conduct this research, and we're working with first responders in the cities of Los Angeles, Irvine and San Diego and with L.A., San Diego, and Orange counties.

Q: Calit² recently launched two new research initiatives in homeland security and medical informatics. How will this put the institute, university and the San Diego region in the forefront of these two explosive industries?

A: We've already had companies introducing products that have emerged from our homelands security work. Entrée Wireless has packaged our linking of the cellular Internet with the Wi-Fi Internet into what they call a MANPack (a battery-powered, briefcase-size device that integrates a high-speed wireless Wi-Fi access point with access to a third-generation cellular network) and now is selling these to first responders. So that's a new marketplace. The fact that Calit² had been working with the community and with all these technologies not only develops a new system, but also a new market.

In medical informatics, we're at the very, very early stage of a gigantic transformation of the medical enterprise from completely analog to completely digital. We were just up at Irvine having conversations with the UC Irvine Medical School hospital. They are building a new hospital, and they want it to be "smart." So they're looking at a lot of ideas and trying to integrate as many of the technologies we have into their hospital. The lack of a digital infrastructure can lead to a public safety problem caused by mistakes made in hospitals. Most of those are due to the fact that the systems are analog -- they are handwritten or in file folders. The second thing is efficiency. One of the problems is doctors don't know where the patients are as they make their rounds in the limited time they have. The doctor gets to the room and the patient isn't there - the patient may be doing blood work or other tests, but the doctor or nurse doesn't know where the patient has gone. With emerging technologies like smart tags that use location awareness, doctors could go to where the patients are in a logical order, because the doctor would have a real-time readout of all the patients' current positions.

The hospital is a large complex system, and Calit² looks at the impact of these new technologies on complex systems. As new disruptive technologies roll out across these application areas, they create vast business opportunities. If we can simply be at the center of that facilitation, we will have a lot of impact for years to come.

Q: Calit² has begun work on Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), the new Internet standard that has greatly expanded addressing capability. Why is it imperative for the industry to accept and adopt this new version of IP?

A: The rest of the world is moving ahead on IPv6 whether the United States wants to come along or not. A lot of our markets are now global. For example, Japan is committed to IPv6, so if a U.S. company wants to do business with Japan, their products will have to be compatible with IPv6. The U.S. Department of Defense is also transitioning to IPv6, so, by the end of the decade, if you want to sell anything to the DoD, you have to be on IPv6. It's time to stop fighting the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and get on with the future, so we're trying to develop large applications that require IPv6 -- things like in telemedicine, where we are remotely controlling large electron microscopes in Japan from San Diego. Whenever there is a large installed base with an older technology, the people who control that installed base don't want to have to change. Think of all the companies that have IPv4 (the current Internet protocol) and say, "Oh my God, this is like a Y2K thing' where we will have to change over all our systems." The main thing we're trying to do is help educate America about the advantages of IPv6 and to try to start building it into our systems as much as possible, so we can help accelerate this technology transition.

Q: Calit² has created living laboratories where academic research prototypes, and industrial partners' early products are moved into the field for system integration and testing. Why it is essential to have this type of research environment?

A: Given that we are working on a number of real-world complex systems, such as cars and hospitals, not in the Ivory Tower, we need to deploy our systems in a real-world environment. You have to have the complexity in the system you are studying, or your test system is not the real beast you want to study. One of the great advantages of a university is that we are in not in a profit-driven situation. So we can afford to take a longer view, and it is mandatory that we do that because some part of our society has to. Somebody needs to think about the future and that's our job.

Q: With the competition for research funding heating up, has it become more difficult to secure funding for Calit²?

A: We have been raising more and more money every year. Innovation is what people want to invest in.

Q: Calit² has a partnership with the Mexican National Science and Technology Council (CONACyT) and the Center for Scientific Investigation and Higher Education (CICESE) in Ensenada. Why is it vital to share IT resources and collaborate with Mexico?

A: What we have been trying to do is integrate some of the premier Mexican scientific research centers into our living laboratories. For example, for 30 years, CICESE has worked with the UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography. But CICESE now has a new school in communications, so we would like to link them into things like our OptIPuter (a name I made up-see www.optiputer.net), which looks at using dedicated optical fibers to provide super-Internet access. We'd like to be able to tie together the lab in Ensenada with the lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I believe that Mexico is one of California's largest trading partners, so the economy of California is intimately tied with Mexico. Also, the regional economy of northwestern Mexico and southern California are very tied together. If we work with each other, we can help each other grow.

Q: Why will the research that Calit² is doing not only help shape the future of telecom but also help enhance our quality of life?

A: Southern California could become the growth engine, not just for the state of California, but also for the entire country. However, it is severely challenged by what the growth is doing to the transportation systems, the environment, housing, and health care. Calit² is just a little fish in the ocean, but one of the few hopeful signs for more sustainable development lies in applying all these new technologies in IT and wireless. My belief is that we need to look not just at how IT and telecom can help big companies be more efficient, but also at how we can apply these new technologies to social and environmental fabrics to make them better. We like to say Calit² is not only here to help the future California economy, but also to improve the quality of life for the citizens of California. We should take a broader view than just how new technologies are affecting the bottom line. Technology can also help our region become more livable.

Q: What should we expect to see in the next year at Calit²?

A: The next year for Calit² will be dominated by our new buildings coming online. We're moving into the new building in UC Irvine in October and at UCSD in February (2005). Together, the two new buildings will add 350,000 gross square feet, with state-of-the-art laboratories, clean rooms, digital cinema and wireless labs. That is 50 times the amount of space Calit² occupies now! We will probably have about 700 faculty, students and staff inhabiting the two buildings. We're going to have a lot on our hands to successfully grow our organization and develop the new facilities, but, once we do, we will be much more capable in our ability to help the region and the state.