Interested students should have experience with the following:

• Flash 9 (AS3) programming
• PHP programming
• MySQL databases

Ideally, students would also have some experience with usability testing and evaluation although this is not mandatory.

Interested students (graduate or undergraduate) should contact Nick (nad@cc.gatech.edu) with your resume and interest in the position.

Speaker: Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab
Date: Thursday, March 27, 2008
Time: 2p - 3p
LOCATION: TBD (Somewhere in TSRB or in CoCB 102)
Relevant URL: http://raskar.info

Computational Photography is an emerging multi-disciplinary field that is at
the intersection of optics, signal processing, computer graphics+vision,
electronics, art, and online sharing in social networks. The field is
evolving through three phases. The first phase was about building a
super-camera that has enhanced performance in terms of the traditional
parameters, such as dynamic range, field of view or depth of field. I call
this Epsilon Photography. Due to limited capabilities of a camera, the scene
is sampled via multiple photos, each captured by epsilon variation of the
camera parameters. It corresponds to the low-level vision: estimating pixels
and pixel features. The second phase is building tools that go beyond
capabilities of this super-camera. I call this Coded Photography. The goal
here is to reversibly encode information about the scene in a single
photograph (or a very few photographs) so that the corresponding decoding
allows powerful decomposition of the image into light fields, motion
deblurred images, global/direct illumination components or distinction
between geometric versus material discontinuities. This corresponds to the
mid-level vision: segmentation, organization, inferring shapes, materials
and edges. The third phase will be about going beyond the radiometric
quantities and challenging the notion that a camera should mimic a
single-chambered human eye. Instead of recovering physical parameters, the
goal will be to capture the visual essence of the scene and analyze the
perceptually critical components. I call this Essence Photography and it may
loosely resemble depiction of the world after high level vision processing.
It will spawn new forms of visual artistic expression and communication.

Bio
Ramesh Raskar will join the Media Lab, MIT in Spring 2008 as head of the
Camera Culture research group. Dr. Raskar received the TR100 Award,
Technology Review’s 100 Top Young Innovators Under 35 worldwide, 2004 and
Global Indus Technovator Award 2003, instituted at MIT to recognize the top
20 Indian technology innovators on the globe. He holds 30 US patents and has
received Mitsubishi Electric Invention Awards in 2003, 2004 and 2006. He is
currently co-authoring a book on computational photography (with Jack
Tumblin).