News

06-07-17

Changhong Zhao, advised by Professor Steven Low is a winner of this year’s Charles Wilts Prize, for his doctoral thesis "Real-Time Load-Side Control of Electric Power Systems." The Charles Wilts Prize is awarded every year to a graduate student in Electrical Engineering for outstanding independent research.

Tags: EE honors CMS Wilts Prize Steven Low Changhong Zhao

06-07-17

The student winners of the 2017 Demetriades - Tsafka - Kokkalis Prizes have been announced. Manuel Alejandro Monge Osorio received the prize in Biotechnology for his work with Professor Azita Emami which involves developing novel techniques for the miniaturization of implantable medical electronics in two important pillars: localization of medical devices and electrical stimulation. Pinaky Bhattacharyya was the recipient of the prize in Seismo-Engineering, Prediction, and Protection for his work with Professor Jim Beck investigating an information-theoretic approach to the problem of the optimal sensor placement for Bayesian system identification of structures using response time-history data. Bryan M. Hunter, working with Professor Harry Gray, received the prize in Environmentally Benign Renewable Energy Sources for his work on the development and characterization of a nickel-iron layered double hydroxide water oxidation catalyst with the goal of developing a solar-driven device for the synthesis of fuels, with hydrogen production as a target. The winner of the prize in Nanotechnology was Anupama Thubagere Jagadeesh whose research interests are focused on understanding the engineering principles behind designing and synthesizing programmable molecular machines.. Anupama’s graduate advisor was Professor Lulu Qian. The prize in Entrepreneurship was given to Ken Y. Chan who was advised by Professor Viviana Gradinaru. His research interests lie in developing tissue clearing technologies to render whole organs transparent for optical investigation..

Tags: EE honors MedE MCE CMS Demetriades - Tsafka - Kokkalis Prizes James Beck Lulu Qian Harry Gray Azita Emami Manuel Alejandro Monge Osorio Pinaky Bhattacharyya Bryan Hunter Ken Chan Viviana Gradinaru Anupama Thubagere Jagadeesh

05-31-17

Computing and mathematical sciences student Celia Yuxin Zhang advised by Professor Yizhao Thomas Hou is a recipient of the 2017 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. She has broad research interests in astrophysics, software engineering, and evolution. The Henry Ford II Scholar Award is funded under an endowment provided by the Ford Motor Company Fund. The award is made annually to engineering students with the best academic record at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Tags: honors CMS Henry Ford II Scholar Award Thomas Hou Celia Yuxin Zhang

05-26-17

Postdoctoral Scholar Nikolai Matni and alumnus Yuh-Shyang Wang, working with Professor John Doyle, have received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE American Control Conference 2017 for the paper entitled System level parameterizations, constraints and synthesis. [Read the paper]

Tags: EE CMS alumni John Doyle Nikolai Matni Yuh-Shyang Wang

05-19-17

Christopher Umans, Professor of Computer Science, is the recipient of the 2017 Northrop Grumman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. The Prize is awarded to an EAS professor who demonstrates, in the broadest sense, unusual ability, creativity, and innovation in undergraduate and graduate classroom or laboratory teaching. A nomination for Professor Umans read, “his course on computational complexity has become the de facto way that students decide if they're interested in computer science. It is an extremely challenging, mathematical course but his crisp, entertaining lectures bring everyone along.” Students in his class described it as, “my favorite class at Caltech so far", and ”I didn't think I liked theoretical CS until I took this course.”

Tags: honors CMS Christopher Umans

05-18-17

Electrical Engineering alumna, Fei-Fei Li, who worked with Professor Pietro Perona has made Forbes’ list of 20+ leading women in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. She is currently Chief Scientist of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning at Google Cloud. "We all have a responsibility to make sure everyone - including companies, governments and researchers - develop AI with diversity in mind,” Fei-Fei Li emphasized. [Forbes article]

Tags: EE CMS Pietro Perona Fei-Fei Li

05-15-17

Caltech student interns were part of the Virtualitics team that took first place in the Bounty Hunter challenge and second place in the Master Maven challenge at the 2017 OpenWERX Hackathon. Bounty Hunter involved predicting geospatial locations based on satellite imagery, and weather patterns. Master Maven involved scraping massive amount of social media and other information to quantify certain relationships. SOFWERX sponsored this worldwide data science competition. Teams were judged on the basis of their machine learning insights, data visualization, and presentation. The Caltech student interns are: Kshitij Grover, Aakash Indurkhya, Nand Kishore, Siddharth Murching, Anshul Ramachandran, Sarthak Sahu, and Richard Zhu [Bounty Hunter video response] [Master Maven video response]

Tags: honors CMS alumni

05-09-17

Kanianthra Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus, is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society 2017 Harry H. Goode Memorial Award. for “for seminal contributions to distributed and parallel programming, including the development of the UNITY formalism.” The Goode Award recognizes achievements in the information processing field which are considered either a single contribution of theory, design, or technique of outstanding significance, or the accumulation of important contributions on theory or practice over an extended time period. [IEEE Computer Society story]

Tags: honors CMS Kanianthra Chandy

05-09-17

Computer science and mechanical engineering student Kun ho (John) Kim is a recipient of the 2017 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. John is working with Professors Burdick and Perona to develop novel machine learning methods for medical applications and crowd sourced data mining. The Henry Ford II Scholar Award is funded under an endowment provided by the Ford Motor Company Fund. The award is made annually to the engineering student with the best academic record at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Tags: honors MCE CMS Henry Ford II Scholar Award Pietro Perona Joel Burdick Kun ho (John) Kim

05-05-17

Aaron Ames, Bren Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, handbuilds bipedal robots and designs the algorithms that govern how they walk. These algorithms couple efficiency equations with boundary constraints to teach robots to generate their own walking gait. [Interview with Professor Ames]

Tags: research highlights MCE CMS Aaron Ames