12-18-18
In a recent Techer interview Electrical Engineering alumna Fei-Fei Li (PhD ’05) explains, “As we see artificial intelligence impacting the real world, it’s no longer a niche computer science, technical field. Policymakers, business leaders, educators, social scientists—they all need to take part and guide the future of A.I.” [Check out the full interview]
Tags: EE CMS alumni Fei-Fei Li
12-13-18
"Projections with current climate models—for example, of how features such as rainfall extremes will change—still have large uncertainties, and the uncertainties are poorly quantified," says Professor Tapio Schneider, principal investigator of the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA). "For cities planning their stormwater management infrastructure to withstand the next 100 years' worth of floods, this is a serious issue; concrete answers about the likely range of climate outcomes are key for planning." The new climate model will be built by a consortium of researchers led by Caltech, in partnership with MIT; the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS); and JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. It will use data-assimilation and machine-learning tools to improve itself in real time, harnessing both Earth observations and the nested high-resolution simulations. "The success of computational weather forecasting demonstrates the power of using data to improve the accuracy of computer models; we aim to bring the same successes to climate prediction," says Professor Andrew Stuart. [Caltech story]
Tags: research highlights CMS ESE Tapio Schneider Andrew Stuart
12-12-18
Chiara Daraio, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, and colleagues have developed phononic devices that include parts that vibrate extremely fast, moving back and forth up to tens of millions of times per second. The devices were developed by creating silicon nitride drums that are just 90 nanometers thick. The drums are arranged into grids, with different grid patterns having different properties. Professor Daraio, along with former Caltech postdoctoral scholar Jinwoong Cha, have shown that arrays of these drums can act as tunable filters for signals of different frequencies and can act like one-way valves for high-frequency waves. [Caltech story]
Tags: research highlights Chiara Daraio MCE APh postdocs Jinwoong Cha
12-12-18
GALCIT graduate students Marcel Veismann, Chris Dougherty, and Xichen Shi received a KPMG innovation award for their work on the Center on Autonomous Systems and Technology (CAST) robotic flying ambulance. The students were recognized for “achieving the highest level of excellence in research and innovation” and had the opportunity to presented to an audience of 300 executives at the LA Auto Show.
Tags: honors GALCIT Marcel Veismann Chris Dougherty Xichen Shi
12-11-18
Michael Ortiz, Frank and Ora Lee Marble Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, has received a Doctorate Honoris Causa (honorary doctorate) from his alma mater, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. [ENGenious article featuring Professor Ortiz’s solid mechanics research]
Tags: honors GALCIT MCE Michael Ortiz
12-11-18
President Thomas F. Rosenbaum’s end of the year message to the Caltech community highlights the InSight spacecraft landing and the celebration of Frances Arnold’s 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He states, “these recent events … underscore the extraordinary technological acumen that is necessary to realize the implications of big ideas. The Institute is known throughout the world for its mastery of fundamental science, but it is the connection of these fundamental precepts to engineering innovation that sets Caltech apart.” [Read the full message]
Tags: Thomas Rosenbaum
12-07-18
Caltech has awarded the inaugural Milton and Rosalind Chang Career Exploration Prize to EAS undergraduate alumnus, Sean McKenna (BS ’17, ACM) for his proposed project “Exploring Ways to Tackle California’s Housing Crisis.” McKenna plans to spend the next year connecting with residents, housing developers, homeless shelters, technology innovators, and policymakers in California and Washington, DC to learn more about the roots of the housing crisis. He is grateful for the “incredible amount of freedom" the Chang Prize will give him "to figure out how the skills and passions I developed at Caltech might translate into making a difference in the housing crisis, a problem that is very real for me, other Techers, and all residents of California.” [Alumni Association story]
Tags: honors CMS alumni Sean McKenna
12-03-18
Thanks to Professor Pietro Perona and his graduate students including Grant Van Horn and Sara Beery, the next wildlife photo you snap might set you on a path to helping map life on Earth. “The whole web, this huge repository of wonderful information, is indexed by words,” Perona says. “But when we have an image—a visual query—we don’t know what to do unless there is an expert next to us. We’ve gotten so numb to the idea that we’ll never find the answer out.” [Breakthrough story]
Tags: EE research highlights CMS Pietro Perona Grant Van Horn Sara Beery
11-27-18
Fei Chen (BS ’11 EE) is on the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list for “building better microscopy technologies … that could help explain how complex tissues like the brain, made of a large collection of diverse cell types, are organized.” As an Electrical Engineering undergraduate student at Caltech Fei Chen was an Axline Merit Scholar for his outstanding record of personal and academic accomplishments. Currently he is a Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute, Harvard-MIT. [Forbes 30 Under 30 Full List]
11-26-18
Chiara Daraio, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, has been awarded the UC San Diego Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Outstanding Alumna Award for her outstanding achievements in mechanical metamaterials and materials science. [Award recipients]
Tags: honors Chiara Daraio MCE APh
