News & Events

10-10-17

Brent Fultz, Barbara and Stanley R. Rawn, Jr., Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics, and colleagues have pinpointed that arrangement of atoms is the main source of an increase in entropy during the glass transition. One persistent mystery about metallic glasses occurs at the so-called "glass transition." A cold metallic glass is hard and brittle, but when it is heated past a certain point—the glass transition—it becomes soft. [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS research highlights Brent Fultz MatSci

09-29-17

Wei Gao, Assistant Professor of Medical Engineering, is interested in the future of personalized and precision medicine, and is engineering the next generation of wearable health monitors and nanomachines that could enable rapid and hyper-localized drug delivery and surgery. The sweatband health tracker he is developing is capable of studying health at a molecular level. By analyzing an individual’s sweat, the device can monitor dehydration levels as well as blood glucose levels in real time. [Caltech interview]

Tags: research highlights MedE Wei Gao

09-12-17

Azita Emami, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering; Investigator, Heritage Medical Research Institute; and EAS Division Deputy Chair, along with her colleagues including Professor Mikhail Shapiro have developed microscale devices that relay their location in the body. "We wanted to make this chip very small with low power consumption, and that comes with a lot of engineering challenges," says Professor Emami. "We had to carefully balance the size of the device with how much power it consumes and how well its location can be pinpointed." [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights MedE Azita Emami Mikhail Shapiro

09-11-17

Andrei Faraon, Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, and colleagues have developed a computer chip with nanoscale optical quantum memory. "Such a device is an essential component for the future development of optical quantum networks that could be used to transmit quantum information," says Professor Faraon (BS '04). [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights Andrei Faraon APh

08-25-17

Yisong Yue, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, and colleagues have developed an algorithm that can automatically recognize formations of teams—how they arrange themselves on the field—when analyzing player tracking data. The algorithm can also imitate players' behavior. "We're training the algorithm to understand soccer at the same level that a fan would. It's not just mindlessly watching faceless players move across a field; it's watching strikers and right midfielders and forwards arrange themselves in specific formations," says Professor Yue. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights CMS Yisong Yue

08-15-17

Professor Ares Rosakis, and colleagues including Professor Nadia Lapusta and Research Scientist Vito Rubino, are studying the way friction changes along a fault during a seismic event by simulating quakes in a lab. "Our unique facility … allows us for the first time to study friction point-wise and without having to assume that sliding occurs uniformly, as is done in classical friction studies," Rosakis explains. Professor Lapusta adds, “some numerical models of earthquake rupture … have used friction laws with slip-velocity dependence… It is gratifying to see those formulations validated by the spontaneous mini-earthquake ruptures in our study. " [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights GALCIT MCE Ares Rosakis Nadia Lapusta Vito Rubino

08-11-17

Peter Schröder, the Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Computer Science and Applied and Computational Mathematics, and his team have built a computational algorithm to model the behavior of vortices—rotating regions of fluids that form phenomena such as tornados or whirlpools. 

Tags: research highlights CMS Peter Schroeder

08-08-17

Professor John Doyle and colleagues are among only nineteen groups in the United States to receive National Science Foundation (NSF) funding to conduct innovative research focused on neural and cognitive systems. They aim is to integrate the capabilities of deep learning networks into a biologically inspired architecture for sensorimotor control that can be used to design more robust platforms for complex engineered systems. [NSF release]

Tags: EE research highlights CMS John Doyle

08-02-17

Caltech and Cornell teamed up to create the iNaturalist Challenge, a competition to create the best machine-learning algorithm for identifying the world's plant and animal species. The contest was an outgrowth of the institutions' previous work together on Visipedia, a visual encyclopedia created by a network of people and machine-learning computers that harvest image information off the internet. The technology was developed for the encyclopedia by Pietro Perona's Vision Group at Caltech and Serge Belongie's Computer Vision Group at Cornell Tech. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights CMS Pietro Perona

07-21-17

Yisong Yue, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, and colleagues have created a new deep-learning software capable of assessing complex audience reactions to movies using the viewer's facial expressions. "Understanding human behavior is fundamental to developing AI [artificial intelligence] systems that exhibit greater behavioral and social intelligence. For example, developing AI systems to assist in monitoring and caring for the elderly relies on being able to pick up cues from their body language. After all, people don't always explicitly say that they are unhappy or have some problem," Professor Yue says. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights CMS Yisong Yue