Charles Elachi Receives Distinguished Alumni Award
01-12-22
Charles Elachi, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Planetary Science, Emeritus, has received the Distinguished Alumni Award for his distinguished leadership in space exploration and planetary science as the longtime director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he was instrumental to realizing missions across the solar system including our own planet Earth, and for his many contributions helping to map out NASA’s long-term scientific future. Caltech’s annual Distinguished Alumni Awards recognize a particular achievement of noteworthy value, a series of such achievements, or a career of noteworthy accomplishment. [Caltech story]
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EE
honors
alumni
Charles Elachi
Wang, Matni, and Doyle Win Axelby Outstanding Paper Award
01-06-22
Yuh-Shyang (Mickey) Wang and Nikolai Matni, two Control and Dynamical Systems (CDS) Ph.D. alums, and John Doyle, Jean-Lou Chameau Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Electrical Engineering, and Bioengineering, won the IEEE CSS Transactions on Automatic Control George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award. The Axelby Award recognizes outstanding papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control in the past two years based on originality, potential impact on the theoretical foundations of control, importance and practical significance in applications, and clarity. [Read the paper]
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honors
CMS
John Doyle
Nikolai Matni
CDS
Mickey Wang
Wennberg Lab Shows How Wildfire Smoke Increases Ozone Pollution
12-09-21
Using data gathered from a specially equipped jet that spent a month flying through and studying wildfire plumes, scientists have a better understanding now of how wildfire smoke impacts air quality. "Of course it is well known that wildfires lower air quality. But it's important to understand the chemical and physical mechanisms by which they do so that we can more effectively forecast how individual fires will impact the communities downwind of them," says Paul O. Wennberg, R. Stanton Avery Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Science and Engineering; Executive Officer for Environmental Science and Engineering; Director, Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science. [Caltech story]
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research highlights
ESE
Paul Wennberg
Lu Xu
Gunnarson and Dabiri Teach AI to Navigate Ocean with Minimal Energy
12-09-21
Engineers at Caltech, ETH Zurich, and Harvard are developing an artificial intelligence (AI) that will allow autonomous drones to use ocean currents to aid their navigation, rather than fighting their way through them. "When we want robots to explore the deep ocean, especially in swarms, it's almost impossible to control them with a joystick from 20,000 feet away at the surface. We also can't feed them data about the local ocean currents they need to navigate because we can't detect them from the surface. Instead, at a certain point we need ocean-borne drones to be able to make decisions about how to move for themselves," says John Dabiri, Centennial Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering. [Caltech story]
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GALCIT
MCE
John Dabiri
Peter Gunnarson
