News

06-05-18

CMS alumnus Ramruthwick “Ruthwick” Pathireddy (BS ’17) is described as curious, ambitious, and rigorous. “When people talk about Caltech, they think of students studying really hard,” Ruthwick says. “While we do study hard, there’s more to it than that. I don’t think people realize the social opportunities that are available here, how enriching the activities are, and how close the entire undergraduate community is. It’s really like a family.” [Breakthrough story]

Tags: CMS alumni Ramruthwick Pathireddy

06-01-18

Applied and computational mathematics student Ayya Alieva, advised by Professor Houman Owhadi, is a recipient of the 2018 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. Her research interests include active learning problems and tournament graphs. This summer, she will be working as a Summer Analyst at Goldman Sachs. 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 at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Tags: honors CMS Henry Ford II Scholar Award Houman Owhadi Ayya Alieva

05-29-18

Carver Mead, one of the fathers of modern computing, combines memoir and instruction in new video series. "My feeling is that these days, if it's not on the web, it doesn't exist," Professor Mead says of the decision to launch the new video channel. The video series is available for free on YouTube, and aims to provide a better understanding of the birth and evolution of modern computing, as told by one of its key participants and witnesses. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE EAS history CMS Carver Mead

04-19-18

Graduate student Erika Ye co-advised by Professors Austin Minnich, Garnet Chan, and Fernando Brandao, has been awarded a 2018 Google PhD Fellowship. The fellowship recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students doing exceptional research in computer science and related disciplines. Erika is attempting to discover what current quantum computers can do that classical computers cannot. Currently she is focusing on computational chemistry—particularly, calculating the behavior of electrons in complex molecules, which ultimately could provide detailed information about reaction rates or how enzymes in cells work. [Caltech story]

Tags: honors MCE CMS Austin Minnich Fernando Brandão APh Erika Ye Garnet Chan

04-13-18

College Factual has ranked the Caltech Applied Mathematics program as number one in 2018. The second place went to Brown University and third went to Harvard University. College Factual is a website that helps students find colleges, majors and careers through national rankings, matching technology, and in-depth college profiles. [Learn more]

Tags: CMS

04-10-18

Anne Zhou, a junior majoring in computer science, has been selected for this year's Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB) Fellows Program. Zhou will spend her summer at DoorDash, an on-demand restaurant delivery service which is also employing drivers to deliver surplus food from restaurants and grocery stores to food banks. The KPCB Fellows focus on technical, design, and product challenges. Though Zhou does not yet know her specific project for the summer at DoorDash, she will likely work with one of three teams: the engineers who design apps and websites, the team that manages customer experience, or the technicians who build and maintain the company infrastructure. [Caltech story]

Tags: honors CMS Anne Zhou

04-09-18

Yizhao T. (Thomas) Hou, Charles Lee Powell Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics, and his former postdoc Dr. Guo Luo are recipients of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) 2018 Outstanding Paper Prize for their paper entitled Toward the Finite-Time Blowup of the 3D Axisymmetric Euler Equations: A Numerical Investigation. The prizes are given for outstanding papers published in SIAM journals during the three years prior to the year of the award. [Read the paper]

Tags: honors CMS Thomas Hou postdocs Guo Luo

03-02-18

When Adam Wierman joined Caltech’s faculty in 2007, he set out to find a new challenge. “I wanted to do something about a problem of fundamental importance,” he says. “Climate is the problem.” To help clean up computing, he decided to design new algorithms for the management of data centers, communication networks, and our power grid. He hoped to find ways to improve the energy efficiency of I.T. infrastructure. But these efforts lead to Jevons paradox—a variation of “If you build it, they will come.” Economist William Jevons wrote in 1865, “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption.” In other words, as people like Wierman make computing and the grid more efficient, we use more, out-spending the savings. [Breakthrough story]

Tags: CMS Adam Wierman

03-01-18

Graduate student Grant Van Horn and postdoctoral scholars Oisin Mac Aodha, working with Professor Pietro Perona, started the iNaturalist Challenge last year, to see how much they could push machine-learning technology. The competition is now in its second year and the dataset contains over 8,000 species, with a combined training and validation set of 450,000 images that have been collected and verified by multiple users from iNaturalist. This year's competition promise to be much more challenging because there are more species and less examples for the computer to learn from. The top submissions will be invited to give talks at  CVPR, which is the premier annual computer vision event. [Enter the competition]

Tags: EE CMS Pietro Perona postdocs Grant Van Horn Oisin Mac Aodha

02-23-18

Four graduate students from the Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) Department and one from the Electrical Engineering (EE) Department have been selected as 2017 Amazon Fellows. This fellows program is the result of a partnership between Caltech and Amazon AWS around Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. The EE fellow is Srikanth Tenneti who is exploring the potential of deep learning for Direction of Arrival applications, and extending Ramanujan Sums based techniques for multi-dimensional periodicity extraction. CMS graduate student Navid Azizan Ruhi is researching faster optimization algorithms for machine learning.  He is looking forward to visiting Amazon AI as a fellow and exchanging ideas with their researchers. Computer science graduate student Hoang Le is developing methods for efficient and intelligent sequential decision making in realistic systems. Florian Schaefer, whose focus is applied and computational mathematics, is researching the interface of statistical estimation and the design of fast algorithms. Control and dynamical systems graduate student Ellen Feldman, working with Professor Joel Burdick, has used part of the funding to present her research at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting and looking forward to other future opportunities to share her research. 

Tags: EE honors CMS P. P. Vaidyanathan Babak Hassibi Joel Burdick Yisong Yue Navid Azizan Ruhi Hoang Le Ellen Feldman Florian Schaefer Srikanth Tenneti Houman Owhadi