Scholarships Available for ABI's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2008! "We Build a Better World" Conference
Keystone, Colorado
October 1 – 4, 2008

The Grace Hopper Celebration is the leading conference for women in the field of computer science and provides a forum to inspire, educate, encourage and create awareness of opportunities for women in the field of computing and to celebrate the considerable achievement of women in the field.

Caltech’s Information Science and Technology office is a Silver Underwriter of the Grace Hopper Celebration, and will receive five full-conference scholarships for students wishing to attend.

Scholarships cover conference registration (which includes most meals), lodging, and an upper limit for airfare based on the geographic region of the applicant. Although the majority of scholarship grants are awarded to undergraduate and graduate students, junior faculty, members of non-governmental organizations and non-profits are eligible for scholarships.

If you are interested in attending and would like to be considered for a scholarship, please contact Rachel Barnes in the IST office at rbarnes@caltech.edu. Please provide a short statement about why you want attend. The Caltech scholarship deadline is August 25.

The topping off of the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Center for Information Science and Technology occurred on April 24. The last girder, with the flag and a tree, was hoisted and placed.

Caltech Trustee, Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., has awarded $1 million to Caltech in support of the final stages of construction of the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Center for Information Science and Technology. The Annenberg Foundation donated $25 million toward the construction of the approximately 50,000-square-foot building, which will serve as home to participants of the IST initiative, an interdisciplinary research and instruction program that addresses the growth and impact of information in nearly every field of science and engineering. Remarks Bechtel, "The collaborative opportunities provided by the Information Science and Technology initiative will support Caltech's effort to find solutions for many of our country's challenges," adds Bechtel. "I'm honored to be a partner in this effort." Read more...

The Computing Research Association has announced that Kevin Dick, an
undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology, has received the 2008 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award in recognition of his outstanding research potential in computing research.

Building on six years of record-breaking developments, an international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by Caltech joined forces to set new records for sustained data transfer among storage systems during the SuperComputing 2007 (SC07) conference. By combining FDT with FAST TCP, developed by Professor Steven Low, together with an optimized Linux kernel known as the "UltraLight kernel," the team reached an unprecedented throughput level of 10 gigabytes/sec with a single rack of servers, limited only by the speed of the disk systems. Read more...

A ground-breaking ceremony for the new Walter and Leonore Annenberg Center for Information Science and Technology will be held on Friday, December 7, 2007 at 11:00 am (site is just east of the Moore Laboratory). The Caltech community is invited. Read more...

IST Postdoc Welcome Reception
Friday, November 16, 2007
4:00–6:00 pm, Moore Courtyard

Scholarships are Available for ABI’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007!

Location: Orlando, FL
Dates: October 17- 20, 2007

The Grace Hopper Celebration is the leading conference for women in the field of computer science and provides a forum to inspire, educate, encourage and create awareness of opportunities for women in the field of computing and to celebrate the considerable achievement of women in the field.

As a Silver Underwriter of Grace Hopper Celebration, Caltech receives five full-conference scholarships for students wishing to attend.

Scholarships cover conference registration (which includes most meals), lodging, and an upper limit for airfare based on the geographic region of the applicant. Although the majority of scholarship grants are awarded to undergraduate and graduate students, junior faculty, members of non-governmental organizations and non-profits are eligible for scholarships.

If you are interested in attending and would like to be considered for a scholarship, please contact Rachel Barnes at rbarnes@caltech.edu. Please provide a short statement about why you want attend.  The Caltech scholarship deadline is June 1 so contact me as soon as you can.

Article: IST breaks new ground (pdf)

Caltech Self-Replicating Chemical Systems Workshop
Rock Auditorium, Broad Center for Biological Sciences
August 27 - 28, 2007

In a new Scientific American article entitled "Breaking Network Logjams," Professor Michelle Effros and colleagues describe network coding - an approach that could dramatically enhance the efficiency and reliability of communications networks. At its core is the strange notion that transmitting evidence about messages can be more useful than conveying the messages themselves.

Richard Murray has been invited to receive the title of Doctor of Technology from the Faculty Board of the Engineering Faculty LTH at Lund University in Sweden on June 1, 2007. This award is being given to acknowledge Murray's contributions to the exchange of students and personnel between LTH and Caltech as well as joint development of courses and teaching material.

Congratulations are due to Caltech's Programming Team - the team placed 12th in the 31st Annual World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), winning a Bronze medal. Caltech's team consisted of Hwan-seung Yeo, Paul Nelson, and Po-Ru Loh, along with coach Eric Stansifer. The teams were faced with solving eight highly complex computer programming problems, modeled on real-world business challenges, in only five hours. This is equal to a semester's worth of curriculum. Only one other U.S. team made it into the top 12; and only one team actually solved all eight problems - Warsaw University, the winner. More details...

Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, has authored the cover article of Scientific American (April 2007) with his article "The Promise of Plasmonics." He describes the potential of technologies that use electron density waves called plasmons. Among many potential applications, plasmonic circuits could help the designers of computer chips build fast interconnects that could move large amounts of data across a chip. Read more...

DARPA Awards $6.5 Million to Effros and Colleagues
Michelle Effros, Professor of Electrical Engineering, and colleagues at three other universities have been awarded a $6.5 million grant by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a large-scale research effort to develop theory for analyzing and designing communication systems in ad hoc wireless networks of mobile devices. Networks of this type are used in field communications by soldiers and first responders. This latest 'DARPA Grand Challenge' may also lead to improved security, automated homes and highways, biomedical applications, and ubiquitous access to multimedia data and entertainment. A key goal is giving a network the intelligence to detect when it is near full capacity so that it can treat different kinds of messages (distress calls, for example) with higher priority than others (routine surveillance video feeds) when capacity becomes scarce. Another critical area is how to prolong the lifetime of networks with battery-powered nodes that cannot be recharged, for example, nodes embedded in structures or deployed in a remote location. Beyond that, a central question will be how to design a network to be as secure as possible within performance constraints. Other potential innovations could include developing new ways to route information around the network and methods for transmitters to cooperatively allocate resources such as power and bandwidth, either to bolster the network's stability or to optimize its performance.

Avi Wigderson to Give Kliegel Lecture on November 20, 2006
Avi Wigderson, Herbert Maass Professor at the School of Mathematics Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, will give the 2006 Kliegel Lecture entitled "The Power and Weakness of Randomness (When You Are Short on Time)".
Date: 2:00 pm, Monday, November 20, 2006
Location: Ramo Auditorium



Tang Wins Dantzig Dissertation Award
SISL Fellow A. Kevin Tang (PhD '06) has won the the first prize of the George Dantzig Dissertation Award given by INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). The award is given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. He finished his dissertation, "Heterogeneous Congestion Control Protocols," in the Networking Lab with his advisor, Professor Steven Low.



Moore Foundation Awards $6 Million for Economics Research
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded $6 million for a study titled "Experimentation with Large, Diverse, and Interconnected Socio-Economic Systems," to be led by Peter Bossaerts, the Hacker Professor of Economics and Management and professor of finance. The purpose of the project is to create new methodologies for large-scale experimentation that will yield new insights into social institutions such as money and banking policy, health care, and social security policy. The work will include Internet adaptation and merging of software for certain types of experiments; expansion software to allow for flexible communications between subjects and experimenters; creation of a means of interaction through recruiting software and commercial payment services; and implementation in a few key projects. Read more...



Kimble Receives Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis
H. Jeff Kimble, Valentine Professor and professor of physics, has been chosen by the German foundation Berthold Leibinger Stiftung as the initial recipient of its new Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis ("Future Prize"). To be awarded every two years, this prize is intended to honor "outstanding milestones in research" related to laser light and carries a prize of 20,000 euros (approximately $25,000). The jury recognized Kimble "for his groundbreaking experiments in the field of cavity quantum electrodynamics," which form "an essential foundation for quantum information technology . . . a key technology of the 21st century."



Hochberg, Baehr-Jones, and Scherer Develop Silicon and Polymer Waveguide
Michael Hochberg and Tom Baehr-Jones, along with Axel Scherer, the Neches Professor of Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, and Physics, and collleagues at the University of Washington, have developed a new silicon and polymer waveguide that can manipulate light signals using light, at speeds almost 100 times as fast as conventional electron-based optical modulators.



Team Caltech Qualifies for Urban Challenge
Team Caltech has qualified as a Track A team to participate in the Urban Challenge, the third DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous vehicle competition. As a Track A team, Caltech, led by Richard Murray, Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Caltech will receive up to $1 million in technology development funds as we achieve key technical milestones. In the final event, on November 3, 2007, at an undisclosed location in the western U.S., robotic vehicles will attempt to complete a 60-mile course through traffic in less than six hours, operating under their own computer-based control. To succeed, vehicles must obey traffic laws while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles. Also among the 11 teams qualifying for Track A status is the Golem Group, an independent team formed by several Caltech alumni including Maribeth Mason, Richard Mason, Jim Radford, Jason Meltzer, Eagle Jones, and current students Robb Walters and Deepak Kumar.



Doctoral student Andrea Armani and Kerry Vahala, Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Professor of Applied Physics, report that an optical microresonator can be configured to detect heavy water. The technique is 30 times more sensitive than any other existing method. The device is shaped like a mushroom and was originally designed three years ago to store light for future opto-electronic applications. With a diameter smaller than that of a human hair, the microresonator is made of silica and is coupled with a tunable laser. The detection method could be helpful in the fight against international nuclear proliferation. Read more...



Professor Emmanuel Candes, Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics, has won the Alan T. Waterman Award. The annual award recognizes an outstanding researcher under the age of 35 in any field of science or engineering supported by the National Science Foundation. The Waterman Award, the highest honor awarded by the National Science Foundation, recognizes candidates who have demonstrated exceptional individual achievements in scientific or engineering research of sufficient quality to place them at the forefront of their peers. Criteria include originality, innovation, and significant impact on the field. In addition to a medal, the awardee receives a grant of $500,000 over a three year period. Read more...



Richard Murray, Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, has won this year's Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. The Feynman Prize is given each year to a Caltech professor who demonstrates exceptional ability, creativity, and innovation in both laboratory and classroom instruction. Kudos Richard!



Biologists have identified every individual gene in the genomes of several organisms. While this has been quite an accomplishment in itself, the further goal of figuring out how these genes interact is daunting. The difficulty lies in the fact that two genes can pair up in a gigantic number of ways. If an organism has a genome of 20,000 genes, the total number of possible pairwise combinations is a staggering total of 200 million. Dr. Weiwei Zhong, a postdoctoral scholar, and Paul Sternberg, Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology, have derived a method of database-mining to make predictions about genetic interactions. This will allow researchers to prioritize which experiments to undertake regarding gene-gene interactions. In the March 10 issue of the journal Science, Zhong and Sternberg report on a procedure for computationally integrating several sources of data from several organisms to study the tiny worm C. elegans, or nematode, an animal commonly used in biological experiments. Organisms share an enormous amount of genetic information - humans and nematodes, for example, are similar in 40 percent of their genes. So gene interaction in one species may shed light on the same interaction in another. Zhong has a doctorate in biology and a master's in computer science: she spends about as much time working on computer databases as she does in the lab with the organisms themselves. "This is the new generation of biologists," Sternberg says. Read more...



Dr. Paul Rothemund, senior research fellow in computer science and computation and neural systems, has devised a way of weaving DNA strands into any desired two-dimensional shape or figure, which he calls "DNA origami." This new technique could be an important tool in the creation of new nanodevices. (Hear NPR's interview with Dr. Rothemund.) Reporting in the March 16th issue of Nature, Rothemund describes how long single strands of DNA can be folded back and forth, tracing a mazelike path, to form a scaffold that fills up the outline of any desired shape. To hold the scaffold in place, 200 or more DNA strands are designed to bind the scaffold and staple it together. Read more...



Richard Murray, Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and Pietro Perona, Professor of Electrical Engineering have each been awarded one of the 30 program awards from the federal Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program. Murray's MURI is for "specification, design, and verification of distributed embedded systems." Perona's MURI is for "learning to recognize for visual surveillance."



Professor H. Jeff Kimble, Valentine Professor and Professor of Physics, and his colleagues have managed to "entangle" the physical state of a group of atoms with that of another group of atoms across the room. This research represents an important advance relevant to the foundations of quantum mechanics and to quantum information science, including the possibility of scalable quantum networks (i.e., a quantum Internet) in the future. Kimble is a member of the Center for the Physics of Information.



Caltech's Engineering & Science covers IST in its latest issue. Read more...



Richard M. Murray, Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, has been named the new Director of Information Science and Technology. Professor Murray will start full-time in April 2006. In the interim, Professor Leonard Schulman, the new Associate Director of IST, will be managing the day-to-day activities. Hats off to Shuki Bruck for serving as the founding Director of IST!



The Classical and Quantum Information Security Workshop was held on December 15-18, 2005, and was orgaznied by CPI. This workshop brought together researchers from a variety of backgrounds who work on various aspects of classical and quantum information security.



In a new development that could be useful for future electronic devices, Kerry Vahala, Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Professor of Applied Physics, and colleagues have created a "photon clock" -- a tiny disk that vibrates steadily like a tuning fork while it is pumped with light.



Massimo Franceschetti, Shuki Bruck, and Leonard Schulman have won the 2004 S. A. Schelkunoff Transactions Prize Paper Award for "A Random Walk Model of Wave Propagation," (IEEE Trans. on Antennas and Propagation, Vol. 52, No. 5, pp. 1304-1317, May 2004).



The partnership of the Office of Metropolitan Architects (OMA) and Gruen Associates will design the new Walter and Leonore Annenberg Center for Information Science and Technology. OMA will lead the project and design the building. Joshua Ramus, OMA partner and head of its New York office, will lead the design team.



Howard Oringer has established the Oringer Fellowship Fund in Information Science and Technology.



The Lee Center for Advanced Networking at Caltech is hosting its Fifth Annual Workshop on Advanced Networking, May 20, 2005.



Bringing together control theorists, experimentalists, and theoretical physicists is the aim of QCSS 05, to take place August 8 - 14, 2005.



The first IST "IST Quarterly Update" (and Ice Cream Social!) was held on Wednesday, April 6, 2005.



New IST Building and Seed Funding for Research Centers
has been received from the Annenberg Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Read more...



The first meeting of the IST Advisory Board was held on campus January 2005.


Engineering a DNA World was hosted by IST and the Center for Biological Circuit Design.



James L. Massey of ETH Zurich gave the James R. and Shirley A. Kliegel Lecture in Engineering and Applied Science on Monday November 15, 2004, 4:00 p.m. in Beckman Institute Auditorium. His topic: Is a Mathematical Theory of Cryptography Possible?



Caltech seeking to blend sciences (pdf) by Kimm Groshong, Pasadena Star News.



Professor John Preskill receives Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia from Stephen Hawking. Read more...



Towards Intelligent Machines: CNSE 10th Anniversary Symposium November 8 - 10, 2004. The Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering celebrates ten years of research by bringing back alums in industry and academia.




Computing Beyond Silicon Summer School Program June 14 - July 9, 2004. Find out more by visiting the CBS³ website.

Professor Robert J. McEliece received the 2004 Claude E. Shannon Award, the IEEE Information Theory Society's highest honor (and the top award in the field of information theory). Robert J. McEliece is the Allen E. Puckett Professor and Professor of Electrical Engineering. The Claude E. Shannon Award of the IT Society honors consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. McEliece will present the Shannon Lecture at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory on June 30.