News

05-02-14

Carver Mead, Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus, celebrated his 80th birthday on May 1, 2014. Professor Mead is best known for his pioneering work on VLSI (very-large-scale integration) circuit technology in the 1970s and 1980s, which made it possible to greatly increase the number of transistors placed on a single semiconductor chip. It is no exaggeration to say that the computer era we live in would not have been possible without VLSI technology. He remains as passionate today about science and engineering as he ever was. "There isn't really a time when you're too old to have new ideas," Mead says. [Caltech interview] [Share Your Memories] [ENGenious article]

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Tags: EE CMS Carver Mead research highlight

04-25-14

Students in Professor Hillary Mushkin’s new media arts seminar (E/H/Art 89 New Media Arts in the 20th and 21st Centuries) have put on a unique exhibition highlighting art and engineering. The course provides a platform for an expanded understanding of engineering and an active, project-based engagement with art history. [List of all projects]

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Tags: EE research highlights MCE CMS Hillary Mushkin

02-24-14

Erik Winfree, Professor of Computer Science, Computation and Neural Systems, and Bioengineering, explains, "I tend to think of cells as really small robots. Biology has programmed natural cells, but now engineers are starting to think about how we can program artificial cells. When I program my computer, I can think entirely in terms of deterministic processes. But when I try to engineer what is essentially a program at the molecular scale, I have to think in terms of probabilities and stochastic (random) processes. This is inherently more difficult, but I like challenges. And if we are ever to succeed in creating artificial cells, these are the sorts of problems we need to address." [Caltech Release]

Tags: research highlights health CMS Erik Winfree

02-04-14

Twenty-five years ago, in December 1988, Professor Alain J. Martin's research group at Caltech submitted the world’s first asynchronous (“clockless”) microprocessor design for fabrication to MOSIS. MOSIS is the oldest integrated circuit foundry service and one of the first Internet services other than supercomputing services and basic infrastructure such as E-mail or File Transfer Protocol. Professor Alain describes this landmark project in his recent paper "25 Year Ago: The First Asynchronous Microprocessor."

Tags: CMS Alain Martin research highlight

01-06-14

A recent New York Times' Science article about a new computing approach based on the nervous system mentions Carver Mead, Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus. The new processors used in this approach consist of electronic components that can be connected by wires that mimic biological synapses. Because they are based on large groups of neuron-like elements, they are known as neuromorphic processors, a term credited to Carver Mead, who pioneered the concept in the late 1980s. [New York Times Article] [ENGenious Article about Carver Mead]

Tags: EE research highlights health CMS Carver Mead

06-03-13

Computer Science Senior Judy Mou has been working with K. Mani Chandy and Julian Bunn to develop an Android phone and tablet application that could be used to keep communities informed about crisis situations, such as local earthquakes, fires, and pollution hazards. Her application, called a situational awareness application, combines this hazard information with dynamically updated, individualized content, such as traffic on the user's commute, campus events, or news feeds that the user has subscribed to. "The test-case for the application that she is building is whether her classmates and housemates use the application," Chandy says. "She knows that she is building something valuable, and she's excited about it. That's one of the things I like best about working with her." [Learn More]

Tags: research highlights CMS Kanianthra Chandy Julian Bunn Judy Mou

03-29-13

Stephen Wolfram (PhD '80 in Theoretical Physics) has been recognized by Caltech with the Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest honor regularly bestowed by the Institute, for his contributions to the fields of computation and physics. Drawing upon his research and discoveries, Wolfram created Mathematica, now considered a standard software-language environment for scientific, technical, and algorithmic computation and software development.  [Caltech Release]

Tags: honors research highlights CMS alumni Stephen Wolfram

03-21-13

Hillary Mushkin, Visiting Professor of Art and Design in Mechanical and Civil Engineering, worked with a group of students taking her new media art history seminar (E/H/Art 89 - the first Caltech course cross-listed in engineering and humanities) to conceptualize, design and fabricate their own original new media artwork using technologies and fabrication methods of their own choice. Students created electroencephalogram (EEG) art, automatic drawing machines, conceptual art-inspired visualizations of mathematical concepts, interactive video projections, electronic instruments and other novel forms. [Photos of the exhibit]

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Tags: EE research highlights MCE CMS Hillary Mushkin

02-08-13

Peter Schröder, Professor of Computer Science and Applied and Computational Mathematics, is the new Deputy Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science. "I look forward to working with Peter over the next several years as we continue with our quest to remain a unique collaborative community of isolated singularities that sets a compelling model as a research and teaching institution," says Chair Ares Rosakis.

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Tags: research highlights Peter Schröder

11-06-12

Christopher Beck (BS '09 Computer Science and Mathematics) is a recipient of a 2012 Simons Graduate Fellowship. The fellowships are given to graduate students in theoretical computer science with outstanding track records of research accomplishments. Beck’s work seeks to establish the limits of how efficiently we can solve computational problems. One of his papers studies a popular class of algorithms known as SAT solvers and shows that if their memory is restricted, then they can require exponential running time. Another result concerns how well we can approximately sample from certain distributions when our computation must be small depth, that is, highly parallelizable. Beck and his co-authors showed that even exponentially large bounded depth circuits cannot sample with even exponentially small success from a certain simple distribution.

Tags: honors research highlights CMS Christopher Beck