News

11-29-21

A team of Caltech undergraduates participating in NASA's 2021 Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge has earned the award for Best Developed Product. The Habitat Orientable & Modular Electrodynamic Shield (HOMES) team earned the Best Developed Product award, because—as noted by NASA—"it's not a concept; it's reality."  [Caltech story]

Tags: GALCIT Charles Elachi Manan Arya Soon-Jo Chung Michael Mello Jason Kastner Richard Abbott

11-09-21

Graduate Student Bijan Mazaheri, was the top American men’s finisher of the LA Marathon on Sunday, November 7, 2021. Mazaheri is in his third year working with the cross country and track & fields programs at Caltech. He came to Caltech after a highly-decorated cross country/track & field career at Williams College that saw him earn eight NCAA All-American honors. [Pasadena Now story]

Tags: CMS Bijan Mazaheri

10-26-21

This past year, a new two-story building took shape in the northeast corner of the Caltech campus. Though modest in design, what takes place inside the structure could transform the future of computing. The building is the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, the result of a partnership between Caltech and Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing branch of Amazon. The goal of the collaboration is to create quantum computers and related technologies that have the potential to revolutionize data security, machine learning, medicine development, sustainability practices, and more. "AWS will benefit from the ideas percolating here on campus," says Oskar Painter, John G. Braun Professor of Applied Physics and Physics and head of quantum hardware at AWS. Painter says quantum computing is still a very young technology, so it is crucial for development efforts to be directly connected to the latest research in academia. [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS CMS Oskar Painter KNI Fernando Brandão

10-26-21

Katie Bouman, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Electrical Engineering and Astronomy; Rosenberg Scholar; Investigator, Heritage Medical Research Institute has been selected as the 2021 Progress Medal recipient by the Royal Photographic Society. Bouman is being recognized for her work developing solutions to image such phenomenon as the first image of a black hole. Her research focuses on computational imaging and designing systems that integrate algorithms and sensor design, making it possible to observe phenomena previously difficult to capture or impossible to measure with traditional methods. [View announcement] [Past recipients]

Tags: EE honors CMS Katie Bouman

10-06-21

Researchers have built a bipedal robot that combines walking with flying to create a new type of locomotion, making it exceptionally nimble and capable of complex movements. "We drew inspiration from nature. Think about the way birds are able to flap and hop to navigate telephone lines," says Soon-Jo Chung, Bren Professor of Aerospace and Control and Dynamical Systems; Jet Propulsion Laboratory Research Scientist. "A complex yet intriguing behavior happens as birds move between walking and flying. We wanted to understand and learn from that." A paper titled "A bipedal walking robot that can fly, slackline, and skateboard" about the LEO robot was published online on October 6 and was featured on the October 2021 cover of Science Robotics. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights CMS Soon-Jo Chung Elena-Sorina Lupu Kyunam Kim Patrick Spieler Alireza Ramezani

09-01-21

Researchers have now conducted a study in which they measured how mice navigate a complicated labyrinth, suggesting a new framework with which to study complex animal behaviors and learning. The mice rapidly learned how to navigate this unfamiliar environment about 1,000 times faster than mice generally learn simple yet unnatural tasks. The research is a collaboration between the laboratories of Markus Meister, Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences, and Pietro Perona, Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE CMS Pietro Perona CNS Markus Meister Tony Zhang Matthew Rosenberg

06-30-21

Undergraduate student Laura Lewis, advised by Elena Mantovan, Professor of Mathematics; Claire Ralph, Lecturer in Computing and Mathematical Sciences; Director, Career Development Center; and Thomas Vidick, Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, has won both the qBraid Technical Challenge in the Quantum Coalition Hack and the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) 2021 Collegiate Award. [Caltech story]

Tags: honors CMS Thomas Vidick Claire Ralph Laura Lewis Elena Mantovan

06-28-21

Thomas Vidick, Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, has been named a Simons Investigator by the Simons Foundation. The intent of the Simons Investigators in Mathematics, Physics, Astrophysics and Computer Science programs is to support outstanding theoretical scientists in their most productive years, when they are establishing creative new research directions. Awardees are outstanding theoretical scientists who receive a stable base of research support from the foundation, enabling them to undertake the long-term study of fundamental questions. [Past Recipients]

Tags: honors CMS Thomas Vidick

06-28-21

Jennifer Sun, graduate student in Computing and Mathematical Sciences, has won Best Student Paper at CVPR 2021. The paper, titled "Task Programming: Learning Data Efficient Behavior Representations," studies how to use programmatic weak supervision to reduce the need for supervised labels.

Tags: honors CMS Jennifer Sun

06-24-21

Without GPS, autonomous systems get lost easily. Now a new algorithm developed at Caltech allows autonomous systems to recognize where they are simply by looking at the terrain around them—and for the first time, the technology works regardless of seasonal changes to that terrain. The general process, known as visual terrain-relative navigation (VTRN), was first developed in the 1960s. By comparing nearby terrain to high-resolution satellite images, autonomous systems can locate themselves. The problem is that, in order for it to work, the current generation of VTRN requires that the terrain it is looking at closely matches the images in its database. To overcome this challenge, Anthony Fragoso, Lecturer in Aerospace; Staff Scientist, Connor Lee, Graduate student in Aerospace, Austin McCoy, Undergraduate, and Soon-Jo Chung, Bren Professor of Aerospace and Control and Dynamical Systems and research scientist at JPL, turned to deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to remove seasonal content that hinders current VTRN systems. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights GALCIT MCE CMS Soon-Jo Chung Anthony Fragoso Connor Lee Austin McCoy