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] 04.13.12
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]
Undergraduate students Zibo Chen, Shayan Doroudi, Yae Lim Lee, Gregory Izatt, and Sarah Wittman have won a gold award at the 2011 International Bio-Molecular Design Competition (BIOMOD). BIOMOD is a competition for undergraduate teams who design research to address the control of biomolecules on the nanometer scale. The Caltech team's challenge was to make a synthetic DNA robot that has the ability to take a random walk —instead of walking on set path or track—on a two-dimensional origami surface that was also made out of DNA. The team is mentored by Professor Eric Winfree and sponsored by the Molecular Programming Project. [Caltech Feature] [Video of Project] 11.21.11
A good choice involves rapidly combining both value and visual information. Here, the fly chooses the food reward offered by the salient flower, but pays a devastating price falling prey to the camouflaged crab spider. From: http://www.ojibway.ca/spider18.jpg
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