News & Events

11-19-18

Alumnus Yong Sheng Soh (PhD ’18, ACM), advised by Professor Venkat Chandrasekaran, has won the 2018 INFORMS Optimization Society Student Prize for his paper entitled Learning Semidefinite-Representable Regularizers. Regularization-based algorithms are widely used in the solution of data-driven inverse problems arising in statistics, operations research, signal processing, and machine learning. These approaches typically require a great deal of prior domain-specific expertise about the structure of the underlying problem. Such expertise is especially challenging to obtain in the modern era of 'Big Data' in which our ability to sense all manner of phenomena and produce massive datasets far exceeds our ability to understand the underlying mechanisms governing the phenomena. In his award-winning work, which has been accepted for publication at the Journal of the Foundations of Computational Mathematics, Yong Sheng has developed a new framework for learning suitable regularization methods directly from data rather from human-provided expertise. [INFORMS Optimization Society Award] [Read the paper]

Tags: honors CMS alumni Venkat Chandrasekaran Yong Sheng Soh

11-19-18

This year's International von Kármán Wings Award honorees were Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of the French Centre National d'Études Spatiales and A. S. Kiran Kumar, Vikram Sarabhai Professor and former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization and former secretary of the Indian Department of Space. The ceremony also featured the presentation of two scholarships to honor top graduate students in aerospace. "This event is absolutely unique," said Professor Ares Rosakis and chairman of the the Aerospace Historical Society. "What makes it so is that it reflects the phenomenal international connections between Caltech, GALCIT, JPL, and NASA and it also highlights the true international nature of aerospace. More importantly, it gives us the opportunity to take a glimpse at the future by also honoring our own students who will one day define the future of space science and the future of space technology." [Caltech story] [Student scholarship winners] [Program for 2018 award ceremony]

Tags: honors GALCIT Ares Rosakis Jean-Yves Le Gall A. S. Kiran Kumar

11-13-18

Ten years ago, Caltech and City of Hope forged a partnership that combined what each institute was best at—engineering and medicine, respectively—with the goal of developing new biomedical technologies. At this year’s partnership celebration two projects were highlighted one involving Professor Yu-Chong Tai’s work on tracking tumors and the other building on Professor Morteza Gharib’s device to measure heart health. [Caltech story] [ENGenious MedE feature]

Tags: research highlights MedE Yu-Chong Tai Morteza Gharib

10-30-18

Andrei Faraon, Professor of Applied Physics, and colleagues have introduced a technology called "folded metasurface optics," which is a way of printing multiple types of metasurfaces onto either side of a substrate, like glass. In this way, the substrate itself becomes the propagation space for the light. As a proof of concept, the team used the technique to build a spectrometer. Such compact spectrometers have a variety of possible uses, including as a noninvasive blood-glucose measuring system. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights Andrei Faraon APh

10-25-18

Professor Ali Hajimiri and colleagues have developed a new optical gyroscope that is 500 times smaller than the current state-of-the-art device, yet they can detect phase shifts that are 30 times smaller than those systems. Their device achieves this improved performance by using a new technique called "reciprocal sensitivity enhancement." In this case, "reciprocal" means that it affects both beams of the light inside the gyroscope in the same way. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights Ali Hajimiri

10-18-18

Translational technology developed in Professor Harry A. Atwater’s laboratory seeks to improve the efficiency of solar panels by tweaking the architecture of the metal-grid layout of individual cells. The new startup company—ETC Solar, LLC—which is marketing the technology, took first place at the DOE's 2018 Cleantech University Prize national collegiate business plan competition in Houston. "To have been selected as a winner is a huge point of validation for the concept, both the innovation and also the impact," says Professor Atwater, who is also a co-founder of ETC Solar along with Thomas Russell, and Rebecca Saive. "It has helped us to make contacts with potential industrial partners and private equity investors," [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS honors research highlights Harry Atwater alumni Thomas Russell Rebecca Saive

10-10-18

Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, explores how nonlinear photonics, a field of optics, enables a broad range of previously less-explored opportunities for using lasers and light detectors for a variety of purposes, including molecular sensing and computing. One possible application of his work is in breath analysis. He describes, “ there's a lot of useful information about your health contained in your breath, but it is difficult to analyze because the concentrations are so low. To overcome that, you could analyze the spectra of exhaled breath using lasers, searching for the spectral "fingerprints," or signatures, that reveal the presence of those compounds.” [Interview with Professor Marandi]

Tags: EE research highlights Alireza Marandi

10-05-18

Alan Barr, Professor of Computer Science, and Peter Schröder, Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Computer Science and Applied and Computational Mathematics, have been elected to the first class of the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy. Professor Barr was selected for his contributions to graphics, primarily for extending computer graphics shape modeling to include physically based and teleological modeling. Professor Schröder was recognized for his pioneering work in geometry processing and multiresolution modeling. The ACM SIGGRAPH Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques. These are principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in computer graphics and interactive techniques. [Full list of academy members]

Tags: honors research highlights CMS Peter Schröder Alan Barr

09-26-18

Tim Colonius, Frank and Ora Lee Marble Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has received the 2018 AIAA Aeroacoustics Award for his outstanding contributions  to theoretical and computational aeroacoustics for the prediction and control of noise and his absolute commitment to educating the next generation. [AIAA release]

Tags: honors MCE Tim Colonius

09-26-18

Researchers from Caltech and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are collaborating in Pasadena to foster a relationship that could change the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) research in Southern California. “Our graduate programs train extraordinarily talented future researchers, who mostly leave Pasadena after completing their PhD." An industry research center located nearby, however, can help retain talent locally, says Professor Pietro Perona one of the architects of the new collaboration. "Together, we can build a critical mass of machine-learning and AI researchers right here in Pasadena.” Primarily affiliated with Caltech via the CMS Department of the EAS Division, AWS will provide summer internships for Caltech students and students of other top universities, job opportunities for alumni, and the potential for collaborations between Caltech and AWS researchers. AWS is also contributing funding for Caltech projects and a pipeline for marketable research. AWS has already committed $2.5 million to Caltech for graduate student fellowships and cloud-computing credits in order to seed AI innovations. [Caltech story]

Tags: CMS Pietro Perona