News & Events

06-04-12

Michelle Effros, Professor of Electrical Engineering, and information theorist colleagues have begun to tackle the difficult problem of calculating capacities for large communication networks such as the internet and mobile phone networks. In two recent publications, they introduce techniques useful for improving the performance of current communication networks and for designing the networks of the future. By demonstrating where current technology falls short of what's possible, these techniques provide a new tool for strategically guiding research and development. [Read the Publications]

Tags: EE energy research highlights Michelle Effros

05-25-12

Erik Winfree, Professor of Computer Science, Computation and Neural Systems, and Bioengineering, and colleagues including Caltech alumnae Rebecca Schulman, have created a new system to copy sequence information. In their approach, tiny DNA tile crystals consisting of many copies of a piece of information are first grown, then broken into a few pieces by mechanically-induced scission, or force. The new crystal bits contain all the information needed to keep copying the sequence. Each piece then begins to replicate its information and grow until broken apart again—without the help of enzymes, an essential ingredient in biological sequence replication. [Caltech Press Release]

Tags: EE research highlights health CMS Erik Winfree Rebecca Schulman

04-13-12

Pietro Perona, Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering, and colleagues including graduate student, Peter Welinder, have been selected for the Innovation Corps (i-Corps) program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The aim of the i-Corps program, which was highlighted by the NSF Director at a recent Wouk Lecture, is to guide promising research with commercial potential out of university laboratories. The winning Caltech proposal is entitled "Combining Machine Vision and Crowdsourcing for Convenient and Accurate Image Annotation." The team has proposed to combine the complementary strengths of human annotators and machines into a hybrid system that would annotate a large body of images which would be a valuable in scientific, medical, as well as many commercial applications. [Video of Wouk Lecture]

Tags: EE research highlights health Pietro Perona NSF Peter Welinder

04-13-12

Telle E. Whitney, Computer Science alumna (MS '81, PhD '85) and member of the IST Advisory Council, will be the featured speaker at Claremont Graduate University's 85th commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 12, 2012. Dr. Whitney is currently the president and CEO of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology which seeks to increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology, and increase the positive impact of technology on the world’s women. [Learn More]

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04-04-12

Hardy C. Martel, Professor of Electrical Engineering, emeritus, passed away on March 29 at his home in Altadena. He was 85. "He was one of the first at Caltech to do research on information science and communications technology," says Roy Gould, the Simon Ramo Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, a lifelong friend and colleague of Martel. "His strength was in his basic, intuitive grasp of ideas and how things worked." [Caltech Feature] [E&S Article in pdf]

Tags: EE EAS history Hardy Martel Roy Gould

03-30-12

Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will be delivering lectures for his Learning From Data class live on Caltech's Ustream channel beginning April 3, 2012."The idea is that if people in the furthest reaches of the world want to learn the material and have the discipline to go through it, we are giving them the opportunity to experience this course in real time," Abu-Mostafa says. "We will be interested to see how this experiment goes." [Caltech Feature]

Tags: EE CMS Yaser Abu-Mostafa

03-19-12

Electrical Engineering alumni Mark H. Kryder (MS ’66, PhD ’70), and Simon Ramo (PhD ’36) are to receive the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award, which is the highest honor the Institute bestows upon its graduates. [Caltech Feature] [EE Centennial Video of Kryder] [Past Recipients]

Tags: EE honors alumni Simon Ramo Mark Kryder

03-16-12

Third place in the 2012 Intellectual Ventures Invention Competition and $10,000 went to senior Alexander Hu and graduate students Steven Bowers, Kaushik Dasgupta, and Kaushik Sengupta. Drawing inspiration from the biological world and the ability of living things to heal wounds, they designed a circuit with its own fully integrated system for self-healing.  This group was mentored by Ali Hajimiri, Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering. [Caltech Feature]

Tags: EE Ali Hajimiri

01-17-12

Carver Mead, Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus, has been awarded the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of Information and Communication Technologies. He was recognized for being "the most influential thinker and pioneer" of the silicon age and for enabling "the development of the billion-transistor processors that drive the electronic devices—for example, in laptops, tablets, smartphones, DVD players—ubiquitous in our daily lives." [BBVA Release]

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01-10-12

Hyuck Choo, Dennis Kochmann, and Austin Minnich focus on quite different challenges, but they all home in on the nanoscale. "Caltech and EAS take pride in lowering the barriers between disciplines to create collaborative environments for researchers such as Hyuck, Dennis, and Austin to work on a variety of topics including understanding and predicting behavior of materials at the nanoscale, which already is an area of strength within EAS," says Ares Rosakis, Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Chair, Division of Engineering and Applied Science. [Caltech Feature]

Tags: EE GALCIT MCE Hyuck Choo Dennis Kochmann Austin Minnich