AIR Distinguished Speaker Series: Ravi Ramamoorthi, Professor, University of California San Diego

Date: February 28, 2024
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm ET
Location: Zoom Webinar
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Speaker: Ravi Ramamoorthi, Ronald L. Graham Professor of Computer Science, University of California San Diego

Talk Title: Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis and Beyond

Abstract: Applications in augmented reality, 3D photography, immersive experiences and appearance acquisition require solving the view synthesis problem – given a few images of an object or scene of interest, how can we synthesize images from new viewpoints. This is a fundamental problem in computer vision and graphics, and can be encapsulated as reconstructing the light field of all light passing through a scene from a set of observations. In this talk, Prof. Ramamoorthi will briefly describe the early history of the problem, and a series of efforts his group has made in light field synthesis from sparse images, ultimately leading to the now widely used neural radiance field representation. He discuss the impact of this work and follow-ups, leading to newer work from his group on personalized avatars, enabling real-time radiance fields or live 3D portraits from a single image.

Biography: Ravi Ramamoorthi is the Ronald L. Graham Professor of Computer Science at UCSD and founding director of the UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing.  He earlier held tenured faculty positions at UC Berkeley and Columbia University, in all of which he played a key leadership role in building multi-faculty researcher groups recognized as leaders in computer vision and graphics.  He has authored more than 200 refereed publications, and won 20 major awards, including the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, being named a fellow of IEEE, ACM and the SIGGRAPH Academy, and an inaugural Frontiers of Science Award.  His educational efforts were twice honored with the edX Prize Certificate for exceptional contributions in online teaching and learning, and ten of his students and collaborators have won major dissertation awards including the ACM Dissertation Award, the ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Dissertation Award and the UCSD Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal.  In industry, Prof. Ramamoorthi has consulted with Pixar and startups in computational imaging, and currently holds a part-time appointment as a Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA.

Student Host: Kevin Miller, PhD Student, Computer Science