Counting L.A.’s Trees
07-27-16
Professor Pietro Perona, has developed a method using Google Earth and Google Street View to count the trees in the city of Los Angeles. The process of counting the trees using human tree counters is very expensive and would cost about $3 million today. The last time the city did such counting was more than two decades ago and at the time there were 700,000 street trees. Perona has tested the methodology in a section of Pasadena where the city recently commissioned a sidewalk survey. By comparing the results to the known inventory, he determined that the computer was about 80% accurate. [LA Times story] [KPCC story]
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CMS
Pietro Perona
Caltech’s Smart Charging Network for Electrical Vehicles
04-24-16
Charging electric vehicles (EVs) can require a substantial amount of electricity (most EVs charge at 7 kilowatts, the equivalent of simultaneously running 70 desktop computers). Steven Low, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, has developed Caltech's adaptive charging network, which uses a smart algorithm to coordinate the charging schedule with the Institute's existing electrical infrastructure. This program helps minimize energy usage and about 30 percent of the electricity at each charging station is from carbon-free renewable sources. [Caltech story]
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energy
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CMS
Steven Low
New Caltech Trustees
03-28-16
Two distinguished leaders in the computing industry—Michelle "Mich" Mathews-Spradlin, and Sabeer Bhatia (BS '91, EE)—have been elected to the Caltech Board of Trustees. Mich Mathews-Spradlin is an angel investor, primarily in the technology sector. She previously served as a top executive at Microsoft Corp., beginning her career in 1989 as a United Kingdom–based consultant and then joining the company in the United States in 1993. Sabeer Bhatia, a pioneer of web-based email, is cofounder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Sabse Technologies Inc., a mobile-telecommunications company. He was the cofounder of Hotmail Corporation, guiding that company's rise from a 1996 start-up into one of the world's largest email providers. Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1998, eventually turning it into Microsoft Outlook. [Caltech story]
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Caltech Trustees
Professor Chandrasekaran Wins AFOSR Young Investigator Award
02-23-16
Venkat Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering, has won a 2016 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award. The objectives of this program are: to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering. Professor Chandrasekaran received the award for his proposal entitled, “Latent Variable Graphical Modeling for High-Dimensional Data Analysis. [AFOSR Press Release]
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Venkat Chandrasekaran
Next-Generation Distribution Infrastructure
12-17-15
Caltech’s smart grid team led by Professors John Doyle, Steven Low, and Adam Wierman along with their collaborators have been awarded $3.9 million for an Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) Network Optimized Distributed Energy System (NODES) project entitled "Real-time Optimization and Control of Next-Generation Distribution Infrastructure." NODES is ARPA-E’s new program focused on enabling more than 50% usage of renewable power on the grid. The Caltech team will develop a comprehensive distribution network management framework that unifies real-time voltage and frequency control at the home/distributed energy resource controllers’ level with network-wide energy management at the utility/aggregator level. [Learn more]
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energy
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Adam Wierman
John Doyle
Steven Low