 Professor Michael Hoffmann, Hui-Ming Hung (PhD '00), and Joon-Wun Kang have been awarded the prestigious Jack Edward McKee Medal for their thorough characterization of a technique that has laid the groundwork for the development of a practical system for the efficacious removal of MTBE from contaminated groundwater. The McKee Medal, named for the past Water Environment Federation (WEF) president and Caltech professor, was created to honor achievement in groundwater protection, restoration, and sustainable use. Read More...
Professor André DeHon has been selected as one of the TR100 -- Technology Review's list of the top 100 researchers (35 years of age or younger) whose work will transform our world in the years to come. DeHon is cited for designing architectures needed to build practical molecular computers, which includes figuring out how to arrange nano-wires into working circuits and the invention of a reprogrammable architecture based on such circuits.
 Professor Emmanuel Candes of the Applied and Computational Mathematics Option and undergraduate Franck Guo have won the Best Paper Award of the European Association for Signal, Speech, and Image Processing (EURASIP) for their paper "New multiscale transforms, minimum total variation synthesis: application to edge preserving image reconstruction".
 "Bubbloy" is a new springy foamed metal recently invented by Caltech doctoral students Chris Veazey and Greg Welsh in the lab of Professor Bill Johnson. This reincarnation of a bulk metallic glass has the stiffness of metal but the springiness of a trampoline. Bubbloy is one of several advances that will be showcased at the September 15 conference Materials at the Fore, the third annual meeting of the Center for the Science and Engineering of Materials at Caltech.  Presentations included "Nano-scale Mechanical Properties," by Moore Distinguished Scholar Subra Suresh and "Thermoelectric Devices," by Professor Sossina Haile. Read More...
Team Caltech is poised to meet the DARPA Grand Challenge: build a completely autonomous vehicle that will drive itself (off road) from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in 10 hours or less. The project is student-driven, with faculty, JPL, and industry advisors led by Professor Richard Murray. It is managed by David Van Gogh, and is using the talents of dozens of Caltech undergraduates. The prize for the winners? A cool million. Read More...
 Professor Demetri Psaltis, along with colleagues Karsten Buse and Christophe Moser (PhD '01) have received the Best Application Award at the Ninth International Conference on Photorefractive Effects, Materials, and Devices for their work on holographic filters. The award is presented annually and recognizes significant advances in photorefractive systems, in particular the novelty of the winning idea and the importance of the practical problem it solves. The recipients will share $2,000 euros.
 Professor Christopher Brennen is the first non-Japanese recipient of the Fluids Science Research Award, given by the Japanese Fluid Science Foundation. Brennen, author of Cavitation and Bubble Dynamics, is an international expert in cavitation and multiphase flows. His contributions to the field of rocketry have greatly benefited the development of the U.S. and Japanese space programs.
 Professor Ares J. Rosakis has won the 2003 Frocht Award from the Society for Experimental Mechanics. This award recognizes "outstanding achievement as an educator in the field of experimental mechanics."
 Professor Peter Schröder has been named this year's winner of the Computer Graphics Achievement Award by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Technology (ACM SIGGRAPH). He is being recognized for his achievements in the field of multiresolution modeling and the more general field of digital geometry processing. This work has important consequences ranging from special effects to engineering design. Read More...
 Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and Professor of Computation and Neural Systems Christof Koch is featured in an article in the July 14 issue of The Scientist for his work with Francis Crick and colleagues to discover the underlying neural correlate of consciousness.
 Professor Robert J. McEliece has been chosen to receive the IEEE Information Theory Society's highest honor, the Claude E. Shannon Award for 2004, honoring his consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. Professor McEliece will receive an honorarium of $10,000 and will present a talk as part of the Shannon Lecture Series at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory in 2004. The award is named for Claude E. Shannon, an American mathematical engineer, whose work on technical and engineering problems within the communications industry laid the groundwork for both the computer industry and telecommunications.
|
 Professor Pietro Perona, Rob Fergus, and Andrew Zisserman, have been chosen to receive the Best Paper Award for their paper entitled "Object class recognition by unsupervised scale-invariant learning." This will be presented at the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2003 June 20 in Madison, WI. The award includes $1500 provided by VisionIQ, to be shared by the paper's co-authors. Rob Fergus received his Master of Science and Engineering at Caltech in June 2002 where he studied in Professor Perona's Vision Lab. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Oxford University studying robotics. Andrew Zisserman is a Professor of Engineering Science also at Oxford University, where he heads the Visual Geometry Group.
 Professor Jehoshua (Shuki) Bruck and EE PhD student Marc Riedel have been awarded best paper prize in the 2003 Design Automation Conference (DAC) that was held June 2-6 in Anaheim, CA for their work on "The Synthesis of Cyclic Combinational Circuits." DAC (in its 40th year) is the premier conference in the area of Electronic Design Automation. DAC was attended by over 10,000 people. Overall, the 40th DAC had 628 submissions of which 152 papers were accepted. The award includes a certificate and $1000.
Caltech's 109th Commencement Ceremony was held on June 13, 2003. The E&AS Division awarded 130 Bachelor of Science degrees; 75 Master of Science degrees; and 52 PhDs.
Francis Clauser, the Clark Blanchard Millikan Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, celebrates his 90th birthday. Read more...
 Six Caltech professors have been awarded Sloan Research Fellowships, $40,000 unrestricted awards given to allow young scientists the freedom to establish their own independent research projects at a pivotal stage in their careers. From E&AS, Thanos Siapas, assistant professor of computation and neural systems, received one of these prestigious awards. The Sloan Fellows are selected on the basis of "their exceptional promise to contribute to the advancement of knowledge."
 Steven Low and colleagues break Internet speed record with FAST protocol that enables one to download a 2-hour DVD movie in 5 minutes (see report in Nature).The researchers achieved a speed of 8,609 megabits per second (Mbps) by using 10 simultaneous flows of data over routed paths, the largest aggregate throughput ever accomplished in such a configuration.
The Division presents the third issue of ENGenious. View PDF and HTML pages of the Winter 2003 issue.
 Caltech applied physicist Harry Atwater and his colleagues have announced their success in creating the world's smallest waveguide, called a plasmon waveguide, for the transport of energy in nanoscale systems. As reported in the cover article of Nature Materials, in essence, they have created a sort of "light pipe" constructed of a chain-array of several dozen microscopic metal slivers that allows light to hop along the chain and circumvent the diffraction limit of light. In addition to their functionality as miniature optical waveguides, these structures are also sensitive to the presence of biomolecules. Thus, a virus or even a single molecule of nerve gas could conceivably be detected with an optical device designed for biowarfare sensing. The ultrasmall waveguide could also be used to optically interconnect to electronic devices, because individual transistors on a microchip are already too small to be seen in a conventional optical microscope. Read More...
 Applied physicists demonstrate a micro chip optical resonator with record-high efficiency. Reporting in the February 27, 2003 issue of the journal Nature, Kerry Vahala, Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and professor of applied physics and graduate students Deniz Armani, Tobias Kippenberg, and Sean Spillane describe an optical microtoroid resonator with a Q factor 10,000X times higher than any previous chip-based device. The devices have potential applications as nonlinear sources, biosensors, filters and in cavity QED. Read More...
 Professor Michael Roukes and colleagues have achieved a milestone in their burgeoning field by creating a device that vibrates a billion times per second, or at one gigahertz (1 GHz). The accomplishment further increases the likelihood that tiny mechanical devices working at the quantum level can someday supplement electronic devices for new products. Read More...
 Professor Nadia Lapusta joins Mechanical Engineering faculty.
Research by Dr.'s Jay Hove (Gharib's Group) and Reinhard Koster (Fraser's Group) add to the growing evidence that cardiovascular disease may be rooted in processes initiated in the developing embryo and fetus. New in vivo imaging techniques based on confocal microscopy confirm that intracardiac fluid forces are essential for normal heart looping and for chamber and valve development in early embryonic zebrafish. See cover article in Nature, January 8, 2003. |
