Message from the Director

Welcome to the Ubiquitous Communication by Light (UC-Light) Center. You are surfing a virtual world ubiquitously connected by tiny white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for wireless information sharing and retrieving. Those revolutionary semiconductor lighting devices will replace fluorescent and incandescent lamps for less environmental hazards, more energy efficiency, longer lifetime, enhanced sustainability, easier maintenance, and lower cost. They also lay a foundation to the Center. State and federal entities are encouraging large-scale applications of LED technologies including green communications. The mission of the UC-Light center is to enable wireless communications by embedding signals into the light emitted by next-generation LEDs in systems for illumination, traffic control, advertising, and other purposes.

Funded from the Multicampus Research Program and Initiatives (MRPI) competition within the University of California (UC) system and under assistance of Founding Director, Zhengyuan Xu, the UC-Light center is situated in a modern engineering complex at UC Riverside. The Center research comprehensively and uniquely covers three thrust areas pertinent to LED lighting – efficient lighting, communication, and navigation – with significant potential for creating new technological innovations, economic activity, and energy savings benefits. Developed protocols and sub-systems are further integrated into modern architecture design and ASIC chips to ultimately deliver deployable systems and transfer technologies. The iterative experimentation, modeling, design, validation, and multi-dimensional feedback constitute a unified coherent framework to ensure Center success.

The Center closely interacts with a large community, from communication to lighting industries, standardization organizations, peer researchers, funding agencies, and general public. Additionally, the Center plans to assist industry in commercializing technologies that can revolutionize LED communication and navigation, which will in turn stimulate demands for LED lighting. It also welcomes new advisory board members and industry partners through its partnership programs to support and reshape the Center program. All of them jointly contribute to the next generation LED-based technologies and benefit the society at large, and are warmly welcome to participate in Center’s annual technical review and industry-day events.

We hope you enjoy your journey of web exploration.

Sincerely,
Albert Wang
Director, UC-Light Center
Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, UC Riverside