CITRIS announces recipients of inaugural Innovation Fellowship and AIC Awards
The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS) at the University of California (UC) are honored to announce the inaugural recipients of the 2024 CITRIS Innovation Fellowship and AIC Awards.
Launched in partnership with the Academic Innovation Catalyst (AIC), a deep tech funding platform founded by Matt and Lisa Sonsini, the program turns faculty-developed research into viable commercial solutions for society’s biggest challenges. Recipients receive up to $200,000 over two years to commercialize their innovations, along with support from AIC and the CITRIS Foundry incubator. While all projects relevant to CITRIS’s mission were considered, special attention was given to those within the areas of advanced aviation, aerospace, artificial intelligence (AI) for good, climate resilience and deep tech.
The program received more than 65 entries from across CITRIS’s four campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz, with over half of the submissions addressing climate solutions or AI for the public good. The three winning proposals tackle issues of critical concern across the globe: developing climate-resilient agricultural systems, advancing crop engineering to enhance food security, and safeguarding essential infrastructure and sensitive data through breakthroughs in cybersecurity.
“We are thrilled to support these three groundbreaking ideas and bring them closer to the marketplace,” said Matt Sonsini, founder of AIC. “Selecting only a few innovators from such a competitive pool was no easy task, and it speaks to the exceptional promise and transformative potential of the chosen projects. The awardees stood out for their bold approaches to addressing some of the world’s most pressing issues.”
“Since CITRIS’s inception, a cornerstone of its mission has been to accelerate the journey for trailblazing lab research to commercialization, particularly for the benefit of society,” said CITRIS Director Alexandre Bayen, Liao-Cho Innovation Endowed Chair and professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, and associate provost for the Berkeley Space Center. “I am delighted to see the AIC program advancing this mission by fostering a new wave of faculty-led projects.”
The inaugural award recipients and projects are:
Sensor clip for fast, cost-effective monitoring of plant water status
Resa Ehsani, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Merced
Climate change has triggered more frequent and more severe droughts that have reduced the amount of water available for farming in key agricultural regions. Current methods to check the water needs of crops are costly and inefficient, making it difficult to use precision irrigation techniques that can save water while maintaining or improving crop yield.
This project will develop a robust, reliable and portable sensor that can monitor the water status of any crop, helping growers optimize irrigation schedules without changing their existing systems. Due to its low cost, the technology will be accessible to small and large farmers alike. This advancement will increase the efficiency of water use and food production, even in the face of challenging climate conditions.
Advanced hardware security with unclonable ID protection enabled by photonic technology
Saif Islam, professor and chair of the electrical and computer engineering department at UC Davis and campus director of CITRIS at UC Davis
Protecting computer networks and the rising number of Internet of Things devices from security threats is a complex problem, with many current cybersecurity systems relying on random number generation to keep data safe. However, these numbers are often not truly random, making them susceptible to prediction and thus compromise.
This project aims to develop an innovative chip that uses light to generate unpredictable random numbers. By harnessing tiny, natural variations in how photodiodes interact with the chip’s surface during manufacturing, this process generates unique patterns that are physically impossible to replicate, making the chip highly secure. This technology has the potential to safeguard a wide range of systems, from personal devices to critical infrastructure, against cyberattacks.
Nanotechnologies for rapid crop bioengineering
Markita Landry, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and neuroscience at UC Berkeley
Bioengineering can boost a plant’s nutritional value, enhance a crop’s yield and increase the food system’s climate resilience. However, developing a single genetically modified crop can take more than a decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Seeking to streamline the expensive and time-intensive process, this project investigates multiple nanotechnology strategies to precisely and seamlessly deliver nucleic acids and proteins to plant germline tissue. These methods would allow scientists to correct genetic disorders and introduce desirable traits at the earliest stage of development at a fraction of the time and cost.
The project will also explore the commercialization of cell-penetrating peptide tools, especially if the technologies prove effective for delivering proteins to microspores, an essential cell for fertilization in plants such as corn, rice and wheat.