Ramesh Raskar Kicks-off 2009 DMI Media Tech Tonic Lecture Series

DMI welcomes Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab, Camera Culture Group Leader and Co-Director of the Center for Future Storytelling to MassArt to kick-off its fall 2009 Media Tech Tonic Lecture Series on Tuesday, October 20 at 6:30 with "Computational Photography: "The Future Starts Now".

Though revolutionary in many ways, digital photography is essentially electronically implemented film photography. By contrast, computational photography exploits plentiful low-cost computing and memory, new kinds of digitally enabled sensors, optics, probes, smart lighting, and communication to capture information far beyond just a simple set of pixels. It promises a richer, even a multilayered, visual experience that may include depth, fused photo-video representations, or multispectral imagery. Professor Raskar will discuss and demonstrate advances he is working on in the areas of generalized optics, sensors, illumination methods, processing, and display, and describe how computational photography will enable us to create images that break from traditional constraints to retain more fully our fondest and most important memories, to keep personalized records of our lives, and to extend both the archival and the artistic possibilities of photography.

Ramesh Raskar joined the Media Lab from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 2008 as head of the Lab's Camera Culture research group. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he introduced "Shader Lamps," a novel method for seamlessly merging synthetic elements into the real world using projector-camera based spatial augmented reality. In 2004, Raskar received the TR100 Award from Technology Review, which recognizes top young innovators under the age of 35, and in 2003, the Global Indus Technovator Award, instituted at MIT to recognize the top 20 Indian technology innovators worldwide. In 2009, he was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. He holds 30 US patents and has received three Mitsubishi Electric Invention Awards. He is currently co-authoring a book on computational photography.

Media Tech Tonic #10
Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009
Computational Photography: The Future Starts Now
Ramesh Raskar
MIT Media Lab, Associate Professor
Camera Culture Group, Leader
Center for Future Storytelling, Co-director

Media Tech Tonic #11
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Margaret Livingstone
Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School a
Author of Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing

Media Tech Tonic #12
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Judith Donath
Director, Social Media Group, MIT Media Lab

The series is free and open to public but requires registration at http://mediatechtonic.com/

All lectures are scheduled for 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and will be held at MassArt's Tower Building, Room 312. Click here for directions to MassArt or here for a campus map.

Click here to learn more about the fall 2009 Media Tech Tonic Lecture Series.