News

09-05-17

Professor Morteza Gharib and colleagues including alumni Derek Rinderknecht (PhD '08), Niema Pahlevan (PhD '13), and Peyman Tavallali (PhD '14) and Caltech visitor in medical engineering Marianne Razavi have demonstrated that the camera on your smartphone can noninvasively provide detailed information about your heart's health. "In a surprisingly short period of time, we were able to move from invention to the collection of validating clinical data," says Professor Gharib. [Caltech story]

Tags: GALCIT MedE Morteza Gharib alumni Derek Rinderknecht Niema Pahlevan Peyman Tavallali Marianne Razavi

09-01-17

This fall, three graduate students will enter Caltech as Kortschak Scholars in Computing and Mathematical Sciences. They are the first students in the Kortschak Scholars program, a newly established endowment for incoming PhD students in computer science at Caltech. “We are grateful to the Kortschaks for their vision and generous support enabling our students to identify the research areas where their passion could have the biggest impact. The Kortschak Scholars will be attracted to Caltech by the opportunity to work at the leading edges of computing and mathematical sciences to invent the technologies of the future,” said EAS Chair G. Ravichandran. [Breakthrough story]

Tags: CMS Guruswami Ravichandran alumni Walter Kortschak

06-30-17

Joe Zadeh is vice president of product for Airbnb. At Caltech, he pursued graduate work in bioengineering, designing biomolecules and created algorithms for self-assembling nucleic-acid structures. Addressing other alumni he states, “Caltech gave you a degree in a field, but it also taught you how to think. What you’re doing is trying to [take] something nebulous and make it concrete. In some ways, that’s what start-ups do. Actually a lot of start-ups don’t look a lot different structurally from most research labs at Caltech.” [Techer story]

Tags: CMS alumni Joe Zadeh

05-26-17

Postdoctoral Scholar Nikolai Matni and alumnus Yuh-Shyang Wang, working with Professor John Doyle, have received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE American Control Conference 2017 for the paper entitled System level parameterizations, constraints and synthesis. [Read the paper]

Tags: EE CMS alumni John Doyle Nikolai Matni Yuh-Shyang Wang

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]

Tags: honors CMS alumni

05-01-17

On April 19, 2017 Electrical Engineering alumnus Evangelos Simoudis (BS '83) moderated a panel titled "The Road Ahead: A Panel on the Future of Driverless Vehicles," hosted by the Caltech Associates. The panel members were Professors Mory Gharib, Richard Murray, and Pietro Perona, along with Reuters automotive industry reporter, Paul Lienert. They discuss a variety of opportunities and challenges associated with autonomous technologies and systems. Beyond the legal and ethical challenges, several technological obstacles must be overcome before driverless cars become common on the road. One key challenge is teaching driverless cars how to read the behavior of other cars and react accordingly. Professor Perona described the problem of a car attempting to merge onto a crowded freeway. A driverless car would see an impenetrable wall of vehicles, but a human driver could edge forward and wave at other drivers to work his or her way into the line of traffic. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE GALCIT CMS Morteza Gharib Pietro Perona alumni Richard Murray Evangelos Simoudis Paul Lienert

04-24-17

Alumnus Qiuyu Peng who was advised by Professor Low and was a member of the Rigorous Systems Research Group is one of the recipients of the IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize. He received the prize for his paper Multipath TCP Algorithms: Theory, Design and Implementation. The prize is for an original paper that is of high quality, shows originality, is timely, and has clarity of presentation. [Past recipients]

Tags: EE CMS alumni Steven Low Qiuyu Peng

03-02-17

Caltech has recognized Engineering and Applied Science alumna Regina Dugan (PhD '93 Mechanical Engineering) with the Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest honor regularly bestowed by the Institute. Dr. Dugan is being honored for her sustained record of leadership and innovation in technology and business. [Caltech story]

Tags: honors MCE alumni Regina Dugan

02-02-17

Alumnus Sébastien Candel (PhD '72) has been elected as president of the French Academy of Sciences (Académie des sciences, Institut de France). The Academy, which was created in 1666, is committed to the advancement of science and advises government authorities on scientific issues.  Candel obtained his PhD in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics from Caltech and is a receipient of the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award for his contributions to aerospace. [Caltech story] [Candel's Marble Lecture]

Tags: GALCIT MCE CMS alumni Sébastien Candel

12-20-16

About 200 Caltech alumni, students, faculty, and friends filled the Beckman Institute Auditorium on November 12 for the Caltech Alumni Association's sold-out event, Caltech Computes: Disrupting Science and Engineering with Computational Thinking, which showcased the impact of a computational approach on a variety of fields, including biology, astronomy, and economics. [Caltech story] [Videos of event]

Tags: CMS alumni