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.

SISL Fellow Kevin Tang (PhD '06) has won the the 1st 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.

Charles Elachi, Caltech vice president, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and professor of electrical engineering and planetary science, has been selected to receive the 2006 Royal Society of London Massey Award, which "recognizes outstanding contributions to the development of space research, interpreted in the widest sense, in which a leadership role is of particular importance." He has also been named one of "America's Best Leaders" by U.S. News & World Report and the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Elachi received his bachelor's degree at the University of Grenoble in 1968 and his Caltech PhD in electrical engineering in 1971, the same year he began working for Caltech/JPL.

Reporting in the July 21, 2006, issue of Physical Review Letters, the researchers demonstrate that a laser beam passing through multiple layers of glass and air can be made to last much longer than if it had passed through only one type of medium. Mason Porter and Martin Centurion, postdocs from the Center for the Physics of Information, Demetri Psaltis,the Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Panayotis Kevrekidis, Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst are the principals of this investigation.

Prof. Ali Hajimiri is honored with Excellence in Teaching Award by the Associated Students of California Institute of Technology (ASCIT) for the 2005-2006 academic year.

Joe Bardin, Graduate student, has won an IEEE/MTT-S Graduate Fellowship Award  which will be presented at the IEEE International Microwave Symposium on June 14, 2006, in San Francisco, California. Fellowship awards are presented to outstanding graduate students in the area of microwave and RF technologies. His advisors are Prof. David Rutledge and Dr. Sander Weinreb of JPL

Prof. Ali Hajimiri and former graduate students, Dr. Xiang Guan and Prof. Hossein Hashemi (USC) received the Best Paper Award for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits for their article titled: "A Fully-Integrated 24GHz Eight-Element Phased Array Receiver in Silicon" for its groundbreaking nature in enabling a new generation of communication devices and on-chip radar. Also at International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February 2006, a team of Caltech graduate students supervised by Prof. Hajimiri reported a complete phased-array radar transceiver with on-chip antennas at 77GHz showing an unprecedented level of mm-wave integration in silicon.

The Clare Boothe Luce Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Women is now accepting nominations from EAS faculty members (pdf file with complete details). The nominations are due January 13, 2006. The Fellowship would begin in July 2006.

MOORE BUILDING KEYS - Effective December 19, the exterior door locks to the Moore building will be changed, and you will be required to use the card swipe. All non residents of the Moore building must contact Carol Sosnowski
(casosnow@caltech.edu) to be added to the list. All holders of building keys, QQ100, are asked to return them to Carol in room 432.

Graduate student, Abbas Komijani, has received the prestigious Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE CICC 2005 conference in San Jose, CA for the paper: "A 24GHz, +14.5dBm Fully-Integrated Power Amplifier in 0.18um CMOS,” presented at CICC 2004 last September. This work shows the possibility of using CMOS technology for power generation at microwave frequencies as high as 24GHz for the first time. The paper is coauthored by his Ph.D. advisor Professor Ali Hajimiri

Professor Tracey Ho was just named to the TR35 - innovators under the age of 35 who's work is changing our world. Also among this year's listing of outstanding scientists and innovators are Caltech alumni Helen Blackwell, PhD '99; Narasimha Chari, BS '96; Rajit Manohar, BS '94, MS '95, PhD '99; and Adam Rasheed, MS '98, PhD '01. Congratulations to all!

David Rutledge, the Kiyo and Eiko Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering, has been named chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science. Rutledge's research group is currently involved in building circuits and antennas for numerous electronic applications. His work on microwave circuits has been important for various advances in wireless communications and has been useful for applications such as radar, remote sensing, and satellite broadcasting. He replaces Richard Murray, Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, who has been chair of the E&AS Division since 2000. Rutledge will begin his term on September 1.

William Bridges , the Carl F Braun Professor of Engineering, Emeritus is among this year's newly elected fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Also elected from Caltech are Barry Barish, Andrew Lange, Barry Simon, and David Tirrell.

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). Motivated the problem of deploying wireless access points in urban environments, and frustrated by the fact that propagation was modeled using heuristic techniques - they ventured (propagated...) to a new territory and solved analytically the propagation problem using techniques from probability theory

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

Please join us in celebrating the 75th birthday of Professor Amnon Yariv, the Martin and Eileen Summerfield Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at a symposium on Thursday, April 14, 2005, in the Beckman Institute Auditorium at Caltech. Details of the symposium are available here.

For the second consecutive year, the "High Energy Physics" team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers have won the Supercomputing Bandwidth Challenge with a sustained data transfer of 101 gigabits per second (Gbps) between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. This is more than four times faster than last year's record of 23.2 gigabits per second, which was set by the same team. The extraordinary achieved bandwidth was made possible in part through the use of the FAST TCP protocol developed by Professor Steven Low and his Caltech Netlab team.

Ali Hajimiri, Associate Professor of Electical Engineering, has been named among the 2004 list of the world's 100 Top Young Innovators by Technology Review , MIT's Magazine of Innovation.

Graduate student, Ehsan Afshari, has been chosen to receive the prestigious Best Paper Award at the IEEE CICC 2004 conference in Orlando, Florida for his paper: "Non-Linear Transmission Lines for Pulse Shaping in Silicon." presented at CICC 2003 last September. The paper is coauthored by his Ph.D. advisor Professor Ali Hajimiri.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA ) has awarded Demetri Psaltis $8 Million for research on new types of optical devices. To conduct the research, Caltech is establishing a new center called the Center for Optofluidic Integration .

Graduate student, Lun Li, has been chosen to receive the prestigious Best Student Paper Award at the ACM 2004 conference of the Special Interest Group on Data communication that will be held August 30 – September 3 in Portland, Oregon. Every year ACM SIGCOMM awards a best paper whose main author is a student, Li's paper was “A First-Principles Approach to Understanding the Internet's Router-level Topology”, coauthored with David Alderson (Caltech), Walter Willinger (AT&T Labs—Research) and John Doyle (Caltech). Her advisors are Professor John Doyle and Professor Steven Low.

Connections, Foundations, and Edges: Connecting Theory & Applications Across Complex Systems, a Celebration to Mark John Doyle's 50th Birthday, July (14) 15-16 (17), 2004. This two-day symposium is designed to bring together experts in mathematics, physics, biology, and networking in an interactive exchange of ideas on the design, analysis, and control of complex systems. The symposium is preceded by a one-day tutorial (Wednesday, July 14), given by Professor Doyle, consisting of his first attempt to present a new unified theory of complex systems and networks that builds on and integrates methods from controls, dynamical systems, information theory, computational complexity, optimization, and statistical and quantum physics. It will be followed by a day of student talks (Saturday, July 17). Full details and registration information may be found on the website.

Bin Wu, a junior student pursuing a BS degree in Electrical Engineering, is the recipient of the 2004 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. The Henry Ford II Scholar Awards are funded under an endowment provided by the Ford Motor Company Fund. The award is made annually to the engineering student with the best academic record at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Three members of the faculty have been named among the most recent winners of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), including Professor Babak Hassibi of EAS. Hassibi was cited by the White House for his "fundamental contributions to the theory and design of data transmission and reception schemes that will have a major impact on new generations of high-performance wireless communications systems. He has nurtured creativity in his undergraduate and graduate students by involving them in research and inspiring them to apply new approaches to communications problems."

Professor of Electical Engineering, Emeritus, William H. Pickering, a central figure in the U.S. space race and former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1954 to 1976), passed away on March 15. In 1958, as director of JPL, Pickering led the successful effort to place the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, into Earth orbit. Following on the success of Explorer 1, Pickering was instrumental in leading a new era of robotic space exploration, including the first missions to the moon and the planets.

Professor Ali Hajimiri and his students Hossein Hashemi (now a professor at USC), Xiang Guan, Arun Natarajan, Rumi Chunara, and Abbas Komijani have built a novel antenna array system on a silicon chip that functions (among other things) as the world's first "radar on a chip." The chip, a phased array radio system works much like a conventional array of antennas. Several together could provide a smart cruise control for automobiles. Since they are cheap to manufacture, they may very quickly replace the expensive, bulky radar systems in use today; and begin to appear in consumer technologies as well. The chip can also serve as a wireless, high-frequency communications link, providing a low-cost replacement for the optical fibers that are currently used for ultrafast communications. Hajimiri's chip runs at 24 GHz which makes it possible to transfer data wirelessly at speeds available only to the backbone of the Internet using optical fiber.

Caltech's Information Science and Technology (IST) initiative has faculty and post-doctoral openings. In particular, post-doc positions are available in the Center for the Mathematics of Informations (CMI) and the Center for the Physics of Information.

Cheng Jin, Sanjay Hegde, Raj Jayaram, and David Wei of Professor Steven Low's group were part of a team that won the Bandwidth Challenge Award at the 15th annual Supercomputing Conference (SC-2003, Phoenix, AZ) in Nov. 2003. The FAST TCP protcol developed by Professor Low's group is an important part of the project which got the recognition.

Professor Babak Hassibi has been awarded a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. The Packard Fellowships were established in 1988 to allow the nation’s most promising professors to pursue science and engineering research early in their careers. In 2003, the foundation has selected 16 Fellows to receive individual awards of $625,000, payable over five consecutive years. Dr. Hassibi will be invited to an annual conference to meet with other Fellows, and the Advisory Panel and members of the Board of Trustees September 1-4, 2004, in Monterey, California.

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 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 of Electical Engineering, Emeritus, William H. Pickering, a central figure in the U.S. space race and former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1954 to 1976), passed away on March 15. In 1958, as director of JPL, Pickering led the successful effort to place the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, into Earth orbit. Following on the success of Explorer 1, Pickering was instrumental in leading a new era of robotic space exploration, including the first missions to the moon and the planets.

Professor Ali Hajimiri and his students Hossein Hashemi (now a professor at USC), Xiang Guan, Arun Natarajan, Rumi Chunara, and Abbas Komijani have built a novel antenna array system on a silicon chip that functions (among other things) as the world's first "radar on a chip." The chip, a phased array radio system works much like a conventional array of antennas. Several together could provide a smart cruise control for automobiles. Since they are cheap to manufacture, they may very quickly replace the expensive, bulky radar systems in use today; and begin to appear in consumer technologies as well. The chip can also serve as a wireless, high-frequency communications link, providing a low-cost replacement for the optical fibers that are currently used for ultrafast communications. Hajimiri's chip runs at 24 GHz which makes it possible to transfer data wirelessly at speeds available only to the backbone of the Internet using optical fiber.

Caltech's Information Science and Technology (IST) initiative has faculty and post-doctoral openings. In particular, post-doc positions are available in the Center for the Mathematics of Informations (CMI) and the Center for the Physics of Information.

Cheng Jin, Sanjay Hegde, Raj Jayaram, and David Wei of Professor Steven Low's group were part of a team that won the Bandwidth Challenge Award at the 15th annual Supercomputing Conference (SC-2003, Phoenix, AZ) in Nov. 2003. The FAST TCP protcol developed by Professor Low's group is an important part of the project which got the recognition.

Professor Babak Hassibi has been awarded a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. The Packard Fellowships were established in 1988 to allow the nation’s most promising professors to pursue science and engineering research early in their careers. In 2003, the foundation has selected 16 Fellows to receive individual awards of $625,000, payable over five consecutive years. Dr. Hassibi will be invited to an annual conference to meet with other Fellows, and the Advisory Panel and members of the Board of Trustees September 1-4, 2004, in Monterey, California.

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 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.

Lee Center Workshop held October 18, 2002 ...

Graduate student, Matthew Morgan, received the IEEE/MTT-S Graduate Fellowship Award at the IEEE International Microwave Symposium on June 6, 2002, in Seattle, Washington. Six fellowship awards were presented this year to outstanding graduate students in the area of microwave and RF technologies. His advisors are Prof. David Rutledge and Dr. Sander Weinreb of JPL ...

Jehoshua (Shuki) Bruck, the Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Computation and Neural Systems and Electrical Engineering, is a lead investigator of a multi-university group that has been awarded $15.5 million for five-year program for advancing knowledge of how living cells respond to information and communicate with each other. Bruck will receive more than $1 million of the $15.5 million Alpha Project grant, which has been awarded by the National Institutes of Health's National Human Genome Research Institute to the Molecular Sciences Institute, which will oversee the coordinated effort ...

Michelle Effros, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, was named among the World's Top 100 Young Innovators in technology and business by Technology Review magazine, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...

Professor Thomas E. Everhart (emeritus), has received the 2002 IEEE Founders' Medal ...

P.P. Vaidyanathan has been selected to received one of the IEEE Signal Processing Society 2001 Technical Achievement Awards during the ICASSP 2002 ...

Babak Hassibi has received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award ...

Graduate student Qian Zhao won the Capocelli Prize at the Data Compression Conference sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society in March. This prestigious award is presented once per year to the best student author/presenter; Zhao's paper was "Optimal code design for lossless and near-lossless source coding in multiple access networks"; her advisor is Professor Michelle Effros ...

Professor Ali Hajimiri recently won an IBM Faculty Partnership Award, was awarded a patent on "Distributed Voltage Controlled Oscillators" (along with graduate student Hui Wu), was granted a $750,000 MURI award in collaboration with UC Santa Barbara to develop ultra low-noise oscillators using GaN, and delivered the keynote address at the Plenary Section of Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) Symposium in Phoenix in May ...

IEEE Millenium Medals have been awarded to Professor Robert J. McEliece, Professor David Rutledge and Professor Emeritus R. David Middlebrook, as IEEE members who have been selected by IEEE Societies, Sections, Regions, and Major Boards for outstanding contributions in their respective areas of activity ...