The Caltech Associates

Caltech’s Katherine Bouman and her team made headlines when they captured the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. Next Tuesday, at a Caltech Associates event at Avenue of the Arts Costa Mesa, Professor Bouman will describe the techniques her team developed to produce that image using the Event Horizon Telescope—a network of telescopes around the globe—and the challenges of accounting for time-variability using this method.

She will also discuss the still-unanswered scientific questions that motivate her team to continue improving this computational telescope to see black hole phenomena that remain invisible to us, as well as the techniques the researchers are developing to extract the evolving structure of Sagittarius A*.

See all of our upcoming spring 2024 events on our website:
https://associates.caltech.edu/events

Our 2024 programming kicks off next Tuesday with a fascinating topic: brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). BMIs consist of tiny electrodes that record brain activity, together with machine learning algorithms that interpret the person’s intent. They can enable people with paralysis to control external assistive devices with their thoughts.

Richard Andersen, Caltech’s James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience and holder of the T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center Leadership Chair, is a pioneer in studying the neurobiological underpinnings of brain processes. His discovery of how the brain signals a person’s intent is helping to inform the development of BMI technology.

His team is collaborating on methods to enable study participants to control robotic limbs and operate computer software that, in turn, has enabled them to drink a beverage, play a computer piano— and even drive an automobile! “Bi-directional” BMIs can supplement the control of a robotic limb with an artificially induced sense of touch. The team is also working on BMIs with the potential to decode the inner dialog we have with ourselves toward the end of restoring speech.

See all of our upcoming winter/spring 2024 events on our website: https://associates.caltech.edu/events