News

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]

Tags: EE CMS Pietro Perona Fei-Fei Li

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

05-09-17

Kanianthra Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus, is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society 2017 Harry H. Goode Memorial Award. for “for seminal contributions to distributed and parallel programming, including the development of the UNITY formalism.” The Goode Award recognizes achievements in the information processing field which are considered either a single contribution of theory, design, or technique of outstanding significance, or the accumulation of important contributions on theory or practice over an extended time period. [IEEE Computer Society story]

Tags: honors CMS Kanianthra Chandy

05-09-17

Computer science and mechanical engineering student Kun ho (John) Kim is a recipient of the 2017 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. John is working with Professors Burdick and Perona to develop novel machine learning methods for medical applications and crowd sourced data mining. The Henry Ford II Scholar Award is funded under an endowment provided by the Ford Motor Company Fund. The award is made annually to the engineering student with the best academic record at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Tags: honors MCE CMS Henry Ford II Scholar Award Pietro Perona Joel Burdick Kun ho (John) Kim

05-09-17

Niche.com has ranked Caltech as the Hardest College to Get Into in America for 2017. The ranking was based on acceptance rates and SAT/ACT test scores using data from the U.S. Department of Education. Harvard University placed second on the list, and rounding out the top five are Yale University, the University of Chicago and Princeton University. [Pasadena News Now story] [Niche.com ranking]

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