News & Events

05-27-19

Electrical engineering student Nikhil Poole, advised by Professor Azita Emami, is a recipient of the 2019 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. He is excited to be a part of ongoing research into low-power biomedical devices and integrated circuits with machine learning applications. In addition to CMOS design, he is also interested in hardware and software development for embedded systems. 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 in their discipline.

Tags: EE honors Henry Ford II Scholar Award Venkat Chandrasekaran Nikhil Poole

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

11-22-17

Professor Venkat Chandrasekaran and graduate student Armeen Taeb have developed an empirical statewide model of the California reservoir network. This work offers reservoir managers insight on how to plan and respond to drought conditions. "The bread and butter of hydrology is using physical laws to describe water phenomena. But the behavior of these reservoirs is not solely determined by physical laws of the water cycle, but also by demands and what these reservoirs are being used for," Taeb explains. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights CMS Venkat Chandrasekaran Armeen Taeb

10-14-16

Venkat Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering, is a winner of the 2016 INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers for his paper Relative Entropy Relaxations for Signomial Optimization. The prize is awarded for an outstanding paper in optimization and serves as a recognition of promising colleagues who are at the beginning of their academic or industrial career. [List of winners]

Tags: EE honors CMS Venkat Chandrasekaran

02-23-16

Venkat Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering, has been named a 2016 Sloan Research Fellow in the field of Mathematics for his research in mathematical optimization. The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded yearly to researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE honors CMS Venkat Chandrasekaran

02-23-16

Venkat Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering, has won a 2016 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award. The objectives of this program are: to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering. Professor Chandrasekaran received the award for his proposal entitled, “Latent Variable Graphical Modeling for High-Dimensional Data Analysis. [AFOSR Press Release]

Tags: EE honors CMS Venkat Chandrasekaran

01-24-14

Venkat Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering, has been awarded the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his 5-year project, “Computational and Statistical Tradeoffs in Massive Data Analysis”. The CAREER program is NSF's most prestigious awards for junior faculty members. The level and 5-year duration of the awards are designed to enable awardees to develop careers as outstanding teacher-scholars. Awardees are chosen because they exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Tags: EE honors CMS NSF CAREER NSF Venkat Chandrasekaran

12-12-13

Venkat Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering, is a recipient of a 2013 Okawa Foundation Research Grant for his research project entitled "Computational and Statistical Tradeoffs in Large-Scale Data Analysis". This grant honors outstanding young researchers working in the fields of information and telecommunications. [Past Recipients]

Tags: EE honors CMS Okawa Foundation Venkat Chandrasekaran

09-30-13

Venkat Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering, has won the Young Researcher Prize in Continuous Optimization at the Fourth Mathematical Optimization Society International Conference on Continuous Optimization (ICCOPT) for his paper entitled "Rank-sparsity incoherence  for matrix decomposition".

Tags: EE CMS Venkat Chandrasekaran

09-19-12

Venkat Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, arrived at Caltech in early September 2012. His area of research is mathematical optimization. He describes, "Almost anything we wish to do in engineering design is about maximizing objectives subject to certain constraints—trading off different aspects of a system to optimize a few others. For instance, if you work in jet-engine design, you have certain constraints in the amount of material you can use, the weight of these materials, aerodynamic issues, etc. But then you want to be able to design your wings and so on in such a way that you maximize, for example, how fast you are able to go. My specific focus deals with trying to look at optimization problems that (a) are tractable to solve—not all optimization problems are ones that can be efficiently solved on a computer—and (b) arise in the information sciences." [Caltech Release]

Tags: research highlights CMS Venkat Chandrasekaran