Programs

IST seeks to seed and incubate new fields at the interface of computing and information sciences with other fields — to invent new “CS+X” fields.

Toward that end, the IST initiative has a number of seed grants for students and faculty pursuing creative (crazy) new ideas that cut across disciplines.

• The Carver Mead New Adventures Fund gives yearly grants to projects that are too early stage to attract industry or government support. The fund seeks to enable faculty to pursue exploratory, out-of-the-box projects that cross traditional disciplinary lines. [Read more]
• The Grace Hopper Travel Grant program sponsors graduate and undergraduate students at Caltech to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration each year. The Grace Hopper Celebration is the world's largest gathering of women technologists, and is sponsored by the Anita Borg Institute. The travel grant program aims to send every female student interested in attending at least once during their time at Caltech. [Read more]
• The Amazon Fellows Program is the result of a partnership between Caltech and Amazon AWS around Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. The program recognizes graduate students and postdoctoral scholars that have had a remarkable impact in these areas, and in their application to fields beyond computer science.
• The IST/AWS Cloud Credits Program solicits proposals for research and educational projects that make use of AWS. There are multiple calls each year and proposals that involve the application or development of tools in data science, machine learning, or artificial intelligence are prioritized. [Read more]
• The Kortschak Scholars Program seeks to launch a new era of scholarship, inquiry, and innovation in the artificially intelligent future by allowing top graduate students to be unconstrained in their pursuit of new areas of research in computer science, during their first years in the PhD program. [Read more]
• IST also awards the Ben P.C. Chou Doctoral Prize each year to doctoral dissertations in the broad area of information science and technology. The Prize was established by his wife, June, and his son, Scott (BS 1986), as a lasting tribute for Ben's lifetime dedication to the pursuit of scholarly research. [Read more]
• The Simoudis Discovery Fund provides seed funds for emerging projects at the intersection of big data, machine learning, and autonomy. The funds are allocated yearly to a mix of student and faculty projects.
• The IST Lunch Bunch is a weekly seminar series that focuses on the way that computational and algorithmic thinking impacts disciplines across science and engineering in academia and beyond. Speakers come from a wide range of disciplines, including core areas in computer science and applied mathematics, and varied scientific fields where computing is playing a disruptive role. The series is intended to be a meeting point for researchers across areas that are interested in understanding the impact of computational and algorithmic thinking. [View upcoming IST Lunch Bunch seminars]
• The IST Meeting of the Minds is a research conference featuring keynote talks from leading scientists in industry and a poster session with presentations by distinguished Caltech faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates, showcasing the latest work underway. [Read more]

In addition to these cross-cutting programs, most IST-sponsored centers have active postdoctoral programs that recruit yearly. For information on current calls for applications, go to the CMS position page.