News

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

11-28-17

Joel (J.N.) Franklin, Professor of Applied Mathematics, Emeritus, passed away on November 18, 2017 at the age of 87. Professor Franklin joined Caltech in 1957 and worked closely with Gilbert McCann, professor of applied science, who was one of the early champions of computing at Caltech (and inventor of an analog computer in 1946). Professor Dan Meiron recalls, "Joel excelled as a scholar and researcher … if any of us in applied math—and the Institute in general—had any questions about matrix theory, linear programming, etc. we could consult with Joel and he always pointed us to the relevant results often connected to work he had done in the past." [Caltech story]

Tags: GALCIT EAS history CMS Dan Meiron Joel (J.N.) Franklin

11-22-17

Professor Venkat Chandrasekaran and graduate student Armeen Taeb have developed an empirical statewide model of the California reservoir network. This work offers reservoir managers insight on how to plan and respond to drought conditions. "The bread and butter of hydrology is using physical laws to describe water phenomena. But the behavior of these reservoirs is not solely determined by physical laws of the water cycle, but also by demands and what these reservoirs are being used for," Taeb explains. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights CMS Venkat Chandrasekaran Armeen Taeb

11-15-17

Undergraduate students Peter Kundzicz, Suraj Nair, and Anshul Ramachandran, have won the the Best Paper Presentation Award at the 2017 IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference. Their paper won out of 60 invited papers from across the United States. The paper entitled "Annotated Reconstruction of 3D Spaces via Drones" was inspired by work they did in a Caltech computational vision course (EE/CNS/CS 148) and a robotics course (ME/CS133). [Read the paper]

Tags: honors CMS Peter Kundzicz Suraj Nair Anshul Ramachandran

10-27-17

Listen to Professor Mathieu Desbrun’s conversation about the history and future of computer graphics research with Ed Catmull (co-founder, Pixar Animation Studios; president, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios) and Tony DeRose (senior scientist, Pixar Animation Studios). [SIGGRAPH Spotlight: Episode 6]

Tags: research highlights CMS Mathieu Desbrun

10-25-17

Caltech's Hixon Writing Center team has expanded to include two STEM writing specialists, Christina Birch who has a PhD in biological engineering from MIT and Erin Burkett who has a PhD in geophysics from UC Davis. Hixon director Susanne Hall describes, “now a student in any scientific discipline can come into the writing center and get help on their academic writing from a tutor with firsthand experience of the styles and genres of scientific communication." The center has also begun a partnership with the Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS) to bring STEM writing instruction directly into classrooms. "Communication is of fundamental importance for students today, but it's hard to learn in isolation," Professor Adam Wierman says. "Being able to partner with Hixon to embed writing and communication into my course allowed us to teach students at the moment they needed it.” [Caltech story] [ENGenious snap shot on new EAS course E111]

Tags: CMS Adam Wierman Christina Birch Erin Burkett Susanne Hall

10-24-17

Animashree (Anima) Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, develops efficient techniques to speed up optimization algorithms that underpin machine-learning systems. Speaking about the connections between industry and academia she explains,“bridging the gap between industry and academia is really important. It is a big part of what brought me to Caltech. The sooner we can take theory and deploy it practically, the faster innovation moves and the more impact it can have.” [Interview with Professor Anandkumar]

Tags: research highlights CMS Animashree Anandkumar