EVENT    Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan of Rice University to give keynote at MERL's Virtual Open House

Date & Time:

Thursday, December 9, 2021; 1:00pm - 5:30pm EST

Location:

Virtual Event

Description:

MERL is excited to announce the first keynote speaker for our Virtual Open House 2021:
Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan from Rice University.

Our virtual open house will take place on December 9, 2021, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).

Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities. Prof. Veeraraghavan's talk is scheduled for 1:15pm - 1:45pm (EST).

Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/merlvoh2021

Keynote Title: Computational Imaging: Beyond the limits imposed by lenses.

Abstract: The lens has long been a central element of cameras, since its early use in the mid-nineteenth century by Niepce, Talbot, and Daguerre. The role of the lens, from the Daguerrotype to modern digital cameras, is to refract light to achieve a one-to-one mapping between a point in the scene and a point on the sensor. This effect enables the sensor to compute a particular two-dimensional (2D) integral of the incident 4D light-field. We propose a radical departure from this practice and the many limitations it imposes. In the talk we focus on two inter-related research projects that attempt to go beyond lens-based imaging.

First, we discuss our lab’s recent efforts to build flat, extremely thin imaging devices by replacing the lens in a conventional camera with an amplitude mask and computational reconstruction algorithms. These lensless cameras, called FlatCams can be less than a millimeter in thickness and enable applications where size, weight, thickness or cost are the driving factors. Second, we discuss high-resolution, long-distance imaging using Fourier Ptychography, where the need for a large aperture aberration corrected lens is replaced by a camera array and associated phase retrieval algorithms resulting again in order of magnitude reductions in size, weight and cost. Finally, I will spend a few minutes discussing how the wholistic computational imaging approach can be used to create ultra-high-resolution wavefront sensors.

Speaker:

Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan
Rice University

Ashok Veeraraghavan is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, TX, USA. Before joining Rice University, he spent three wonderful and fun-filled years as a Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge, MA. He received his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2002 and M.S and PhD. degrees from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2004 and 2008 respectively. His thesis received the Doctoral Dissertation award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland. His work has won numerous awards including the Hershel. M. Rich Invention Award in 2016 and 2017, and an NSF CAREER award in 2017. He loves playing, talking, and pretty much anything to do with the slow and boring but enthralling game of cricket.

External Link:

https://merl.com/events/voh21

Research Areas:

Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Digital Video, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security