Ramesh Raskar

Ramesh Raskar
Born	1970 Nashik, Maharashtra, India
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Government College of Engineering, University of Pune
Known for	Shader lamps, Femto-photography, CORNAR, Computational photography, HR3D
Awards	TR100
Scientific career
Fields	Computer scientist
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisor	Henry Fuchs

Ramesh Raskar is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Associate Professor and head of the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture research group. He received the TR100 Award from Technology Review and holds over fifty patents.

His lab produced a number of extreme highspeed pictures using a femto-camera that took images at around one-trillion frames per second. They have also developed a camera to see around corners using bursts of laser light.

His lab also co-produced a new device to compute refractive error of eye (prescription for eyeglasses) on a mobile phone. This has been spun out as a venture EyeNetra.com.

Raskar co-authored one of the earliest books on virtual and augmented reality, Spatial Augmented Reality and made it freely available for download.

Raskar has built a framework for inventing new ideas called Idea Hexagon.

Raskar grew up in Nashik, India and finished his PhD at UNC Chapel Hill.

He co-founded Kumbathon with Sunil Khandbahale, an innovation platform to spot problems and probe solutions in Nashik. The platform has now grown to stimulate impact ventures that empower newly digital citizens in non-metro Tier II cities. Newspaper Guardian news feature describes the details. Impact ventures around newly digital citizens require an integrated effort and a large petri dish for experimentation. A single isolated venture is unlikely to succeed without deep engagement from city businesses; government officials, multiple stakeholders and well identified newly digital citizens. We have found an ideal venue for such a sandbox for venture experimentation. The vibrant and beautiful Kumbh Mela in city of Nashik provides the grounds to test many of these ideas for tech and adoption. At the same time, the innovators are bringing innovative solutions to Kumbh Mela, many of which have been already put in place by the citizens. (The NasikLive app built by Kumbhathon teams is the official app of the Kumbh Mela, providing unprecedented dynamic data to empower visitors and officials of the Kumbh Mela, but also provide 'big-data' solutions for predictive analytics). Kumbhathons are bi-annual camps used for probing tech and adoption risks. Kumbhathon is NOT a traditional hackathon or a competition. Clearly, innovators cannot work for just one specific event like Kumbh Mela. The innovation center now supports the innovators and entrepreneurs to take these ventures to other venues or morph them for daily use by the newly digital citizens.

When speaking to these young innovators many of them often ask Dr. Ramesh Raskar on how to pursue a dream. Dr. Ramesh Raskar in a recent AMA discussed about G-R-O-W :

"Go breadth first: learn what is out there, from online classes, watch videos, read tech magazines

Rebuild you skill set: build stuff, write programs, do experiments, join local tech hobby groups, meet like minded people, help others build stuff in online communities

Online reputation: create a portfolio, make a website, write a blog about your thoughts, share knowledge, attend conferences, network .. think about WHERE to go deep (but don't go too deep on any topic yet) and start exploring

Wow them and Connect: Once you have a good portfolio online, start pinging important folks who may open new doors for you or challenge you pushing you into meaningful directions."

Raskar joined the Media Lab from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 2008 as head of the Lab’s Camera Culture research group. His research interests span the fields of computational photography, inverse problems in imaging and human-computer interaction.Recent projects and inventions include transient imaging to look around a corner, a next generation CAT-Scan machine, imperceptible markers for motion capture (Prakash), long distance barcodes (Bokode), touch+hover 3D interaction displays (BiDi screen), low-cost eye care devices (Netra,Catra), new theoretical models to augment light fields (ALF) to represent wave phenomena and algebraic rank constraints for 3D displays(HR3D).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. In 2010, he received the Darpa Young Faculty award. Other awards include Marr Prize honorable mention 2009, LAUNCH Health Innovation Award, presented by NASA, USAID, US State Dept and NIKE, 2010, Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project Award (first place), 2011. He holds over 40 US patents and has received four Mitsubishi Electric Invention Awards. He is currently co-authoring a book on Computational Photography. [Personal webpage http://raskar.info]

Idea Hexagon

Raskar has built a framework for inventing new ideas called Idea Hexagon. Many inventors around the world feel that the process invention can often seem very confusing.This was one of the reason due to which Dr.Ramesh Raskar felt a need to create a Mental Framework.It is this framework that has now evolved into the Idea Hexagon.

The idea hexagon is an easy-to-use framework that can be used to solve the issues faced during the invention phase and also to solve the problems we come across in day today lives .The simple question that kick-starts the idea hexagon is "If I have an idea X , What is next?"

By Applying formulas to the original idea "X" one can come up with dozens of new ideas.The six strategies that one can use are :

• Raise the Problem to the next level. [ X^d ]
• Combine the idea "X" with something you already know "y" [ X+Y ]
• Given a hammer try to find all the nails, using this one can learn to not only solve the original problem with a specific solution but also to try in finding all the other possible solutions to the problem. [ X↑ ]
• Given a nail, find all the hammers.Given a new problem to solve, try not to stick to the original solution rather find all the different solutions and apply them. [ X↓ ]
• Adding your Favorite Adjective to your original idea 'X' , some of the common adjectives that user are : make the product faster, better and cheaper. But, one can also focus on making it Adaptive, Distributive, Realized, Green etc. [ X++ ]
• The final vortex is trying the inverse of what others are doing, one of the most interesting example that was given by Dr.Ramesh Raskar on his TEDx BeaconStreet talk was about the 'Fosbury Flop' that won Dick Fosbury the 1968 Olympic Gold Medal for high jump. [ x̄ ]

Reddit AMA(Ask me Anything)

Prof. Ramesh Raskar recently held a Reddit AMA(Ask me Anything).

The Reddit AMA is summarized below :

• His ideology of being a successful and responsible world citizen which comprises Four stages of life -

LEARN, APPLY, IMPACT, ACTIVISM. First two are well understood. Impact: your idea is used by dozens, thousands or even millions of people. Constructive Activism: you inspire others via a message or a process.

But we ideally should go through the four phases in that sequence. If you jump straight to impact or activism, your credibility is low and your efforts will have minimal effect. He is ignoring destructive activism here. It is of course easier to break or simply oppose things, but what matters is when you are constructive.

-> He answered questions on his experiments, innovations, experience with science,etc. -> Queries on his light experiment. Coke bottle video (http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar//trillionfps/) PDF link: http://giga.cps.unizar.es/~diegog/ficheros/pdf_papers/femto.pdf ->His scientific experiments : http://www.mit.edu/~velten/press/content/ ->He encouraged young researchers to join his team's efforts to address preventable blindness at http://lvpmitra.com in collaboration with LVP Eye Institute in Hyderabad.

He says "It is very much possible to create a bionic eye. But my guess is that bionic eye will be more effective for augmented reality than for any clinical applications. There are other shortcuts you will see.

      (*) Prevention: diagnostics and procedures to prevent blindness. This is probably the most exciting and impactful area. 
      (*) Using other parts of retina by clever optics 
      (*) Sensory substitution: Map visual signals to other human senses like touch or sound. 
      (*) SynthBiology: channelrhodopsin manipulation on the retinal pigment to make it light sensitive 
      (*) Neural stimulation bypassing the optical path and more

• He shed insight into his critically acclaimed research work on lightfields . He has used lightfields not only for photography but for measuring eyeglasses prescription (http://eyenetra.com), for 3D displays (http://web.media.mit.edu/~gordonw/courses/ComputationalDisplays/), CAT scan machines (http://raskar.info/cat), 3D tracking (http://raskar.info/prakash)

-> He shared resources with budding researchers and future world citizens,so that they can make this world more better. http://www.slideshare.net/cameraculture/how-to-give-a-good-talk http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/ForStudents/ How to invent: http://www.tedxbeaconstreet.com/ramesh-raskar/

-> He answered queries and shared videos of MIT involvement of Kumbhathon at https://www.youtube.com/user/cameraculturegroup/videos?sort=dd&view=0&flow=grid

-> He shed light on REDEx platform. Rethinking, engineering, design, and execution. Where this communities, emerging communities. And they're not necessarily in developing countries.They could be in any emerging areas. Are already anxious to find these problems, to solve these problems. And so we have been very fortunate to have constant connections with this, and it takes a lot of time. It takes two, three, four years before you actually have a meaningful initiative that's up and running. But going back to your question, I think we need those avenues. Not just universities and labs, but labs all over the world, or the world itself as a lab, so we can go forward.

All the REDEx centers and partnerships we have are open to any of you. And that's the only way that it's going to go forward. So I agree with your partnership for challenging. But I think that's going to be the new model. Those are the new places for the organization and deployment. More at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fPqOknXvFNxDsc1LaTVl6W6L-lN_OwBnqAYqHUnGxcg/view

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External links

• Inventor of Femto-Photography Ramesh Raskar
• Co-Founder of Kumbhathon Ventures Dr. Ramesh Raskar
• Founder of EyeNetra Ramesh Raskar
• TEDMED Talk on "How do we look at the future of health with both eyes" by Dr.Ramesh Raskar
• Dr. Ramesh Raskar's Homepage at MIT Media Lab
• Dr. Ramesh Raskar's Publications at MIT Media Lab
• Interview by Popular Photography on "What Photography Will Look Like By 2060 ?"
• Interview by MIT Technology Review on the "Future of Computational Photography"
• Co-Inventor of EyeSelfie ( Self Directed Eye Alignment using Reciprocal Eye Box Imaging ) at MIT Media Lab
• Director of MIT Media Lab Camera Culture Group.
• REDDIT AMA with Prof. Ramesh Raskar – Holder of more than 50 patents
• Reddit AMA Conversation Extract