CISE Seminar: Adithya Pediredla, Dartmouth College

Date: October 9, 2026
Time: 3:00pm – 4:00pm
Location: 665 Commonwealth Ave., CDS 1101

Adithya Pediredla
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Dartmouth College

Physics-Based Rendering for High-Speed Computational Imaging
Computational imaging has transformed the way we capture the world by jointly designing optics, sensors, and algorithms to recover information beyond the capabilities of conventional cameras. Yet this increased capability often comes at the cost of speed. As imaging systems measure higher-dimensional signals such as light fields, time-of-flight, spectra, or polarization, they typically trade off spatial or temporal resolution. While recent advances in sensing hardware, specialized processors, and AI/ML have dramatically accelerated acquisition and reconstruction, the optical front end has largely remained the bottleneck.

In this talk, Adithya will show how sound can be used to build ultrafast optical components that operate at megahertz rates—three orders of magnitude faster than conventional approaches—and integrate seamlessly with modern high-speed sensors. These capabilities enable a range of applications, including high-speed projection, LiDAR, structured-light scanning, event-based light field imaging, underwater optical backscatter communication, and imaging through challenging environments. To design these systems before building the hardware, we relied on simulation: physics-based rendering techniques. These techniques were originally developed to synthesize photorealistic images for graphics, film, and entertainment. Adithya will show how they can be modified to accurately model computational cameras and the physics that governs them. This tight integration of physical simulation, optics, sensing, and computation is opening new opportunities for designing the next generation of fast computational imaging systems.

Adithya Pediredla is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College, where he directs the Rendering and Imaging Science (RISc) Lab. His research lies at the intersection of computer graphics, computational imaging, and computer vision, and spans applications such as novel event sensing, time-of-flight imaging, acousto-optics, underwater imaging and communication, neural scene representations, and computational microscopy. His work has appeared in leading venues, including SIGGRAPH/ACM Transactions on Graphics, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICCP, IEEE TPAMI, Nature, and other top conferences and journals in graphics and imaging. His work has received several distinctions, including the Ralph Budd Best Engineering Thesis Award and the SIGGRAPH Honorable Mention Paper Award. Prior to joining Dartmouth, Adithya received his Ph.D. from Rice University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University.

Faculty Host: Vivek Goyal
Student Host: Abdelrahman Abdeldawad