 Good morning and welcome. My name is Alex Bein. I'm the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley. I'm a faculty in the electrical engineering computer science department and the civil engineering department. I'm really excited to be here this morning and in a very short time I have I'd like to talk about four points which are very important. The first one is what does UC Berkeley bring to the table to help the team here? The second one is to tell you a little bit about the institute because at the end of the day we will be helping on the ground and we'll build a very strong team with Tim and the city. The third one would be about partnerships. That's why we're all here today and fourth one is a very specific thing about the enrollment and the role of Berkeley. So as many of you know we're one of the flagship public universities in the world just like people in the city, people in the state, people in MPOs. We are civil servants. We have a mission of public service and this project today is really a perfect instantiation of our mission. Our mission is really to help the world and in the particular context here to help mobility. So one of the things that I'm particularly excited here together with the team is that we have brought people that are not just engineers. Of course this is a technology project we've heard from the mayor that you know this is the innovation capital of the world but also we have people from the Haas Business School, we have people from the Gulbun School of Public Policy, we have people from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, we have people from the Economics Department from the iSchool and this is really what this project is about. This project is a multidisciplinary project. That's the way we're going to win and that's the way we're going to change the way mobility works in the city. The second thing I want to talk about is the Institute of Transportation Studies. We've been around since 1947. We were created by an act of legislature after World War II specifically to counterbalance the fact that there had not been much investment in our public infrastructure during the war years and today we've grown enormously since the Second World War where 200 people on campus about 40 professors, 60 professional researchers and about 100 PhD students. We're another 50 people on the Lawrence Berkeley Light sub side which is mostly working on the energy component of transportation and we have mainly four missions that will be really working in effort of support of this team here. We're advancing research and obviously this project is about research. We have a teaching curriculum, we have a technology transfer program that brings the research to the practice and we have one of the world-class libraries in transportation and so today what we're bringing to the table is representatives from seven research centers that span almost every possible component there is in transportation. Susan Shaheen who is the director of the Transportation Research Sustainability Center represents one of these centers specifically focused on sustainability and energy but of course all of us who work in transportation know that transportation is a multidisciplinary so we have a center working on policy, we have a center working on automation and intelligent transportation system. California is the birthplace of automated driving. You see Berkeley put automated vehicles on the road in 1997 in San Diego and now we have snow plows which are automated we have we're operating automated bus lines, we have platoon trucks and so on and so forth. So this is this whole expertise that we're bringing here today everywhere where you go in the Bay Area you will see the legacy of joint work of Berkeley and public agencies. If you cross Bay Bridge you will cross the metering lights. In the 1980s Professor Dolph May was working on the very first automated algorithms on these metering lights today where as we're fixing with the new bridge we're updating the algorithms. This is an example of the legacy of Berkeley in this field if you drive on the freeways you'll see travel time displayed on changeable message signs in District 4 where we are today we put the first algorithms together and so on and so forth. This is what we're trying to look forward here we're really looking forward to working with all of you with the city with other public agencies to produce this next revolution that will come with a smart cities challenge and that brings me to my third point which is the public and private partnerships. I'm really excited when I look at the list of people here today because I would say probably two-thirds of the companies who are in the room today we've already worked with you we'll really have many joint projects together at a public university like Berkeley we're really used to do these partnerships and these partnerships are important because if you think about innovation the campus is a very phenomenal location for innovation which is a neutral ground for the private sector to play with the public agencies. Think about what you need in your business and in your technology agenda to advance where you want to go. What you do at the university is you prototype it you test it together so that it migrates to the public sector and with these partnerships and with the leadership of the city and SFMT and all the agencies involved this is what we want to advance and and provide here. The one thing I can say is that the other thing the university provides is we have all the structures in place already because we've done this before and we're a public university we're cheap we're much cheaper than private universities so I think it's going to be a good a good deal to work here. The final thing I want to say on a more serious note is there is enormous support on the campus and at a Lawrence Berkeley lab for this initiative and if you think about it it is very unusual for the chancellor of UC Berkeley to get involved that early in the stage of a competitive process like the smart cities challenge and that is very telling to me. The chancellor I was very excited when the chancellor and the mayor had their first phone conversation several weeks ago because what that tells me is that the campus is standing absolutely full speed behind this effort because they realize that this challenge is very important for California it's very important for the city for the Bay Area and that this is really a great way for the university to contribute to something which will have worldwide visibility and I'm really saying worldwide is even beyond the US and it is completely aligned with the mission and the service agenda that we have at the university. So I want to thank all of you for coming today I want to thank all the people in the city who have put this great team together particularly Tim and finally Go Bears thank you.