Ready for Your Close-Up?
09-27-12
Pietro Perona, Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering, and colleagues have shown that the distance at which facial photos are taken influences perception. Their study found that close-up photo subjects are judged to look less trustworthy, less competent, and less attractive. [Caltech Release]
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Pietro Perona
Caltech Welcomes Professor Chandrasekaran
09-19-12
Venkat Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, arrived at Caltech in early September 2012. His area of research is mathematical optimization. He describes, "Almost anything we wish to do in engineering design is about maximizing objectives subject to certain constraints—trading off different aspects of a system to optimize a few others. For instance, if you work in jet-engine design, you have certain constraints in the amount of material you can use, the weight of these materials, aerodynamic issues, etc. But then you want to be able to design your wings and so on in such a way that you maximize, for example, how fast you are able to go. My specific focus deals with trying to look at optimization problems that (a) are tractable to solve—not all optimization problems are ones that can be efficiently solved on a computer—and (b) arise in the information sciences." [Caltech Release]
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Venkat Chandrasekaran
Professor Sir Martin Sweeting Receives International von Kármán Wings Award
09-14-12
Professor Sir Martin Sweeting, Founder and Executive Chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Limited and Director of the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey, is the 2012 recipient of the International von Kármán Wings Award. He was honored for his technical and leadership contributions to aerospace academia and industry—in particular, for pioneering the concept of rapid-response, low-cost, and highly capable small satellites for Earth observation, communications, and space science. The von Kármán Wings Award acknowledges outstanding contributions by international innovators, leaders, and pioneers in aerospace and is presented by the Aerospace Historical Society, which is part of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at Caltech (GALCIT). [Caltech Release]
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Martin Sweeting
Taming Turbulence
08-29-12
"Turbulence is everywhere," says Professor Beverley McKeon—from continent-spanning weather systems down to the swirls of air your car leaves behind itself as you drive. "I think about things like ships, planes, and pipelines," she explains, noting that about half of the energy consumed by each of those three transportation systems goes to counteract turbulence-induced drag. In her Watson Lecture she notes that finding a way to reduce that turbulence by 30 percent would save the global economy well over $100,000,000 dollars in fuel costs annually. [Learn More]
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Beverley McKeon
Weighing Molecules One at a Time
08-27-12
Michael L. Roukes, Robert M. Abbey Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering as well as Co-Director of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute, and colleagues have created the first-ever mechanical device that measures the mass of a single molecule. The device—which is only a couple millionths of a meter in size—consists of a tiny, vibrating bridge-like structure. When a particle or molecule lands on the bridge, its mass changes the oscillating frequency in a way that reveals how much the particle weighs. [Caltech Press Release]
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Michael Roukes
