News & Events

01-14-20

Adam Wierman, Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences; Director, Information Science and Technology, worked with a cross-disciplinary team to improve the Pasadena Unified School District's open-enrollment algorithm. Wierman knew from experience that the district's open-enrollment process was not optimal. "I couldn't help but notice that it wasn't particularly well designed," says Wierman. "There was a huge opportunity, I thought, to improve." With the team's new and improved algorithm, families are more likely to get their top match and are also more likely to keep their children in the school district rather than enrolling them in private or charter schools. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights CMS Adam Wierman IST

01-09-20

Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, and research team have demonstrated that machine-learning algorithms can monitor online social media conversations as they evolve, which could one day lead to an effective and automated way to spot online trolling. "It was an eye-opening experience about just how ugly trolling can get. Hopefully, the tools we're developing now will help fight all kinds of harassment in the future," says Anandkumar. The research team includes Professor Michael Alvarez; Anqi Liu, postdoctoral scholar; Maya Srikanth, student; and Nicholas Adams-Cohen, Stanford University. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights CMS IST CNS Animashree Anandkumar postdocs Anqi Liu Maya Srikanth

12-19-19

Austin Minnich, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, Fernando Brandão, Bren Professor of Theoretical Physics, and Garnet Chan, Bren Professor of Chemistry, have developed an algorithm for quantum computers that will help them find use in simulations in the physical sciences. The new algorithm allows a user to find the lowest energy of a given molecule or material. Many people are interested in how to simulate the ground states of molecules and materials. "If we want to do a simulation of water, we could look at how water behaves after it has been blasted into a plasma—an electrically charged gas—but that's not the state water is usually found in; it is not the ground state of water. Ground states are of special interest in understanding the world under ordinary conditions," says Chan. [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS research highlights MCE KNI Austin Minnich Fernando Brandão Garnet Chan

12-10-19

Marco Bernardi, Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, and Jinjian Zhou, Postdoctoral Scholar, have developed a way to predict how electrons interacting strongly with atomic motions will flow through a complex material. "Using a new method, we have been able to predict both the formation and the dynamics of polarons in strontium titanate. This advance is crucial since many semiconductors and oxides of interest for future electronics and energy applications exhibit polaron effects," says Bernardi. [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS research highlights Marco Bernardi postdocs Jinjian Zhou

12-06-19

A robot named Balto designed and built by undergraduate students at Caltech working with graduate students at Caltech and JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, took to the field in the first phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean (SubT) Challenge this summer, where the Caltech-JPL team took second place. The SubT Challenge is an international competition sponsored by DARPA to advance technologies to autonomously map, navigate, and search underground environments. Professor Joel Burdick, the leader of the Caltech section of the CoSTAR team says "The drones are our air-based scouts, and Balto is our eyes and ears on the ground. It's light, cheap, and fast. It can get in, find out what's going on, and help us to make decisions about how to proceed." [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights MCE Joel Burdick

11-25-19

In a new paper published in Nature Biotechnology, Wei Gao, Assistant Professor of Medical Engineering, describes a mass-producible wearable sensor that can monitor levels of metabolites and nutrients in a person's blood by analyzing their sweat. Gao's sweat sensor is more sensitive than current devices and can detect sweat compounds of much lower concentrations, in addition to being easier to manufacture. "Considering that abnormal circulating nutrients and metabolites are related to a number of health conditions, the information collected from such wearable sensors will be invaluable for both research and medical treatment," Gao says. [Caltech story] [Read the paper]

Tags: research highlights MedE Wei Gao

11-20-19

Chris Roh, Research Engineer, working with Professor Morteza Gharib, discovered a unique way that bees navigate the interface between water and air. When a bee lands on water, the water sticks to its wings, robbing it of the ability to fly. However, that stickiness allows the bee to drag water, creating waves that propel it forward."I was very excited to see this behavior and so I brought the honeybee back to the lab to take a look at it more closely," Roh says. [Caltech release]

Tags: research highlights GALCIT Morteza Gharib Chris Roh

11-06-19

Beverley McKeon, Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics, has unlocked some of the secrets behind turbulence, a much-studied but difficult-to-pin-down phenomenon that mixes fluids when they flow past a solid boundary. "We knew that, underlying these very complicated structures, there had to be a very simple pattern. We just didn't know what that pattern was until now," says McKeon. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights GALCIT Beverley McKeon

10-28-19

Jing Li, a postdoctoral scholar working with Professor Michael R. Hoffmann, is the recipient of the 2019 Sheldon K. Friedlander Award from the American Association of Aerosol Research (AAAR). The award recognizes an outstanding dissertation by an individual who has earned a doctoral degree in any discipline related to the physical, biomedical or engineering sciences in the field of aerosol science and technology. In her doctoral thesis, Jing focused on studying the global PM-borne biologicals and their toxicity, more broadly in bioaerosol field. Her dissertation work raises the awareness of airborne transmission of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), as well as global differences of local source-specific PM toxicity. [Past recipients]

Tags: honors ESE Michael Hoffmann postdocs Jing Li

10-10-19

Caltech has launched the Schmidt Academy for Software Engineering to train the next generation of science-savvy software engineers and set new standards in scientific software. "This is a recognition that computing, software, and machine learning are going to play a very big role in science. Because Caltech is small and collaborative, we have the opportunity to really make a push in that direction," says Kaushik Bhattacharya, the Howell N. Tyson, Sr., Professor of Mechanics and Materials Science and vice provost. [Caltech release]

Tags: APhMS EE research highlights MCE CMS Tapio Schneider Donnie Pinkston Kaushik Bhattacharya