News

05-05-17

Aaron Ames, Bren Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, handbuilds bipedal robots and designs the algorithms that govern how they walk. These algorithms couple efficiency equations with boundary constraints to teach robots to generate their own walking gait. [Interview with Professor Ames]

Tags: research highlights MCE CMS Aaron Ames

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

04-14-17

James L. Beck, George W. Housner Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus, has been selected by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Engineering Mechanics Institute to receive the 2017 George W. Housner Structural Control and Monitoring Medal “For his exceptional and influential scholarship in structural monitoring and control research, and for his leadership in tackling uncertainty and model complexity through probabilistic approaches with emphasis on Bayesian methods.”

Tags: honors MCE CMS James Beck

04-07-17

Our day-to-day world is shaped by technologies that can be traced back to Professor Carver Mead and his protégés at Caltech. Such as the device you’re using to read this story. [Learn more]

Tags: EE CMS Carver Mead

03-21-17

Undergraduate student, Advitheey Chelikani, has been selected as a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) fellow. He will be working as a software engineering intern on the platform team at Slack this summer and in the fall he will be a software engineering intern on the infrastructure team at Coursera. [List of fellows]

Tags: honors CMS Advitheey Chelikani

03-21-17

Graduate student, Hoang M. Le, from Professor Yisong Yue’s group was runner-up for the best paper award at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He was recognized for his paper, Data-Driven Ghosting using Deep Imitation Learning. [Read the paper]

Tags: honors CMS Yisong Yue Hoang Le

03-14-17

Students in Professor Hillary Mushkin’s media arts seminar (E/H/Art 89 New Media Arts in the 20th and 21st Centuries) displayed and discussed their projects at a recent campus event. The projects used a variety of approaches to explore cyberspace, gaming, the internet, and privacy. [List of projects]

Tags: EE MCE CMS Hillary Mushkin

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

02-23-17

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet and the former CEO of Google, visited Caltech on February 17, 2017. Schmidt suggested that artificial intelligence (AI) could transform the way science is done by allowing researchers to conduct "hypothesis-free" investigations of massive amounts of data. [Caltech story]

Tags: CMS Eric Schmidt