123rd Commencement Ceremony
06-19-17
Caltech’s 123rd commencement ceremony was held on Friday June 16, 2017. The commencement speaker was Mae Jemison, an engineer, physician, and NASA astronaut. Looking up, she said, allows us to remember that there is more that connects us than divides us. "Connection to the greater universe is something I hope for you throughout your lives. Never forget to look up and keep the bigger picture in mind. Look up at the sky, the moon, the stars when you need to recharge. Let the gravity of Earth give you a warm hug when you're feeling low. Look up to remember what inspires you. Keep the sparkle in your eyes, keep it long past graduation." [Caltech story]
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Commencement
Mae Jemison
Winners of the 2017 Demetriades - Tsafka - Kokkalis Prizes Announced
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..
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EE
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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
Professor Umans Receives Northrop Grumman Prize for Excellence in Teaching
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.”
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honors
CMS
Christopher Umans
Alumna on Forbes' List of Leading Women in AI Research
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]
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EE
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Pietro Perona
Fei-Fei Li
OpenWERX Hackathon Challenge Winners
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]
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honors
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alumni
