News & Events

05-16-19

Professor Lihong Wang and Postdoctoral Scholar Dr. Junhui Shi have developed a new imaging technique that uses pulses from two kinds of lasers to take pictures of microscopic biological structures. This new approach, called ultraviolet-localized mid-infrared photoacoustic microscopy, or ULM-PAM, develops images of the microscopic structures found in a piece of tissue by bombarding the sample with both infrared and ultraviolet laser light. "Because ultraviolet light and infrared have different properties, we had to find special mirrors and glass that could focus both," Dr. Shi says. "And because no camera exists that can see both, we had to develop ways to see if they were correctly focused." [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights MedE Lihong Wang postdocs Junhui Shi

03-13-19

Professor Pietro Perona along with Caltech alumni David Hall and Steve Branson have won the 2018 U. V. Helava Best Paper Award from the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Their paper “From Google Maps to a fine-grained catalog of street trees” was selected for the award. The jury described the work in the paper as “innovative, and applicable for large areas of tree classification and inventories. The developed methodology would affect practices of urban tree management globally.” [Read the paper]

Tags: EE honors Pietro Perona alumni postdocs David Hall Steve Branson

09-24-18

In a letter to the Caltech community during National Postdoc Appreciation Week, the Caltech President emphasizes the role this key group plays at the Institute. He stated, “Caltech's mission of world-leading research and education depends crucially on our postdoctoral scholars. Although their time at Caltech may be short, they quickly become vital parts of the Institute's intellectual fabric.” [President’s Letter] [EAS Postdoc Resource Page]

Tags: APhMS EE GALCIT MedE MCE CMS ESE Thomas Rosenbaum postdocs

03-01-18

Graduate student Grant Van Horn and postdoctoral scholars Oisin Mac Aodha, working with Professor Pietro Perona, started the iNaturalist Challenge last year, to see how much they could push machine-learning technology. The competition is now in its second year and the dataset contains over 8,000 species, with a combined training and validation set of 450,000 images that have been collected and verified by multiple users from iNaturalist. This year's competition promise to be much more challenging because there are more species and less examples for the computer to learn from. The top submissions will be invited to give talks at  CVPR, which is the premier annual computer vision event. [Enter the competition]

Tags: EE CMS Pietro Perona postdocs Grant Van Horn Oisin Mac Aodha

05-26-17

Postdoctoral Scholar Nikolai Matni and alumnus Yuh-Shyang Wang, working with Professor John Doyle, have received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE American Control Conference 2017 for the paper titled System level parameterizations, constraints and synthesis. [Read the paper]

Tags: EE CMS alumni John Doyle Nikolai Matni Yuh-Shyang Wang postdocs

12-03-15

Changhuei Yang, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Medical Engineering, and his postdoctoral colleague Dr. Haowen Ruan have developed a novel technique called time-reversed ultrasound microbubble encoded (TRUME) that uses gas-filled microbubbles to focus light inside tissue. "Ultrasound and X-ray techniques can only detect cancer after it forms a mass," Yang says. "But with optical focusing, you could catch cancerous cells while they are undergoing biochemical changes but before they undergo morphological changes." [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights Changhuei Yang MedE health postdocs

07-02-15

Electrical Engineering postdoctoral scholar Dr. Haowen Ruan and graduate student Mooseok Jang, who work with Professor Changhuei Yang, have won first place for Best Student Poster Presentation at the Engineering Conferences International (ECI) series entitled “Advances in Optics in Biotechnology, Medicine and Surgery XIV.” Their winning poster demonstrated research in biomedical optics, specifically a novel technique that focuses light inside biological tissue by time-reversing the light encoded through popping of a microbubble. The technique has the potential to enable one to “see” through biological bodies with light.

Tags: EE honors research highlights Changhuei Yang MedE Haowen Ruan Mooseok Jang postdocs

12-10-12

Ali Hajimiri, Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Postdoctoral Scholar in Electrical Engineering, Kaushik Sengupta, have developed tiny inexpensive silicon microchips that generate terahertz (THz) waves that fall into a largely untapped region of the electromagnetic spectrum and that can penetrate a host of materials without the ionizing damage of X-rays. When incorporated into handheld devices, the new microchips could enable a broad range of applications in fields ranging from homeland security to wireless communications to health care, and even touchless gaming. "This extraordinary level of creativity, which has enabled imaging in the terahertz frequency range, is very much in line with Caltech's long tradition of innovation in the area of CMOS technology," says Chair Ares Rosakis. "Caltech engineers, like Ali Hajimiri, truly work in an interdisciplinary way to push the boundaries of what is possible." [Caltech Release]

Tags: EE energy research highlights MedE health Ali Hajimiri Kaushik Sengupta postdocs

12-07-12

Hyuck Choo, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Postdoctoral Scholar Myung-Ki Kim have invented a light-focusing device that may lead to applications in computing, communications, and imaging. This new kind of waveguide is made of amorphous silicon dioxide and is covered in a thin layer of gold. Just under two microns long, the device is a rectangular box that tapers to a point at one end. With the new device, light can ultimately be focused in three dimensions, producing a point a few nanometers across, and using half of the light that's sent through, Choo says. (Focusing the light into a slightly bigger spot, 14 by 80 nanometers in size, boosts the efficiency to 70 percent). The key feature behind the device's focusing ability and efficiency, he says, is its unique design and shape. [Caltech Release and Video]

Tags: EE energy research highlights Hyuck Choo Myung-Ki Kim postdocs

08-04-11

Liang Feng, a Postdoctoral Scholar in Electrical Engineering who works with Professor Axel Scherer, has designed a new type of optical waveguide - a 0.8-micron-wide silicon device. The waveguide allows light to go in one direction but changes the mode of the light when it travels in the opposite direction. This new technique to isolate light signals on a silicon chip, solves a longstanding problem in engineering photonic chips. [Caltech Press Release]

Tags: APhMS EE energy research highlights Liang Feng Axel Scherer postdocs