News

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

02-20-18

Aadith Moorthy, a senior majoring in materials science and computer science, has been named to the inaugural class of Knight-Hennessy Scholars, a graduate-level scholarship program founded by Stanford University. The program aims to develop a community of future global leaders to address complex challenges through collaboration and innovation. Aadith will receive a scholarship providing full tuition, room and board, and a living stipend while he pursues a PhD in materials science. [Caltech story]

Tags: honors CMS Aadith Moorthy MatSci

02-16-18

IST Advisory Council member Dr. Charles Bennett has won the 2018 Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics for his role in launching quantum information theory. [Wolf Foundation release]

Tags: honors CMS IST Charles Bennett

02-12-18

Victoria Kostina, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, has been awarded the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for her 5-year project, “Information Theory of Dynamical Systems”. 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. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE honors NSF CAREER NSF Victoria Kostina

01-18-18

Caltech and Disney Research have entered into a joint research agreement to pioneer robotic control systems and further explore artificial intelligence technologies. Pietro Perona will work with Disney roboticist Martin Buehler to create navigation and perception software that could allow robotic characters to safely move through dense crowds and interact with people. Aaron Ames will work with Disney Research's Lanny Smoot to further explore robot autonomy and machine learning by creating objects that can self-navigate and perform stunts. Yisong Yue has been working with engineers from Disney Research on the use of machine learning to analyze the behavior of soccer players and to measure audience engagement. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights MCE CMS Pietro Perona Yisong Yue Aaron Ames

01-05-18

As she steps down as CEO of the Anita Borg Institute, Telle Whitney (PhD ’85) reflects on her career in tech—and the path ahead for the next generation of women. From Caltech to researcher to entrepreneur to advocate for women in technology, this Caltech alumna’s career has thrived on risk-taking and transition—and she’s inspired and assisted hundreds of thousands of women along the way. [Techer profile]

Tags: EE CMS alumni Telle E. Whitney

12-22-17

Animashree (Anima) Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, and colleagues have won a Best Poster Award at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) MLtrain workshop. The submission was called “Tensor Regression Networks with TensorLy and MXNet” and the work showed that tensor contractions and regression layers are an effective replacement for fully connected layers in deep learning architectures. The MLtrain workshop focuses on making research more accessible through ipython notebooks and the submissions are judged based on the technical clarity and ease of understanding of the poster and the code. [View the poster]

Tags: honors CMS Animashree Anandkumar

12-22-17

Caltech senior Ching-Yun “Chloe” Hsu has won a 2018 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award from the Computing Research Association (CRA). Her research interests are in theoretical computer science and the intersection of computer science and mathematics.  She learned about the “3SUM Conjecture” when she took a course in computational complexity theory in her freshman year and her subsequent research on that problem has led to important new results that were published in the 42ndInternational Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science in 2017.  In addition, results of her research on the Discrete Fourier Transform were published in the Symposium on Discrete Algorithms in 2018.  She has served as teaching assistant for numerous courses and as an English to Chinese translator for Scientific American. [CRA bulletin]

Caltech senior Jacob (Jalex) Stark received an honorable mention form the CRA awards selection committee.

Tags: honors CMS Ching-Yun (Chloe) Hsu Jacob Stark

12-20-17

CMS postdoctoral scholar Qi (Rose) Yu, working with Professor Anandkumar, and graduate student Stephan Zheng, working with Professor Yue, have won the Best Poster Presentation Award at the 2017 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Time Series Workshop. Dr. Yu works on the challenge of long-term forecasting in environments with nonlinear dynamics such as those involving climate and traffic data. She is tackling this challenge uses Tensor-Train RNN which are a novel family of neural sequence models that learn nonlinear dynamics directly using higher order moments and high-order state transition functions. [View her poster]

Tags: honors CMS Yisong Yue Animashree Anandkumar postdocs Qi (Rose) Yu Stephan Tao Zheng

11-30-17

From autonomous robotics to state of-the-art computer vision, Caltech and Amazon have a lot in common, including the belief that pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will not only disrupt industries, but it will fundamentally change the nature of scientific research. As part of this two-year renewable research collaboration, Amazon will provide both financial support, in the form of funding for graduate fellowships, and computing resources, in the form of AWS Cloud credits, to accelerate the work of faculty and students at Caltech in these areas. [AWS AI Blog]

Tags: CMS Adam Wierman Pietro Perona Joel Tropp Yisong Yue Aaron Ames Animashree Anandkumar