Dont follow the rainbow: How to avoid career traps that can lead you …

Dont follow the rainbow: How to avoid career traps that can lead you to fail, Prof. Ramesh Raskar

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jq_5FaQbTg

After different rejections, the project of a lifetime Ramesh Raskar (associate professor at MIT) finally comes to life.
How did he manage to get his way out of this jungle of misleading signs and career traps? By becoming a pathfinder: always tense towards your goal but also critical and ready to adjust his strategy to reach it.
An incredible life lesson that he gave us in this talk at the last FAIL at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jq_5FaQbTg&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3aAo7SIiCuHY_6ICTjXLOpNBUBwEEJUq72pD-V8N2nX2cWaVIxtPM1gBM

Ramesh Raskar is an Associate Professor at MIT Media Lab and directs the Camera Culture research group. His focus is on AI and Imaging for health and sustainability. These interfaces span research in physical (e.g., sensors, health-tech), digital (e.g., automating machine learning) and global (e.g., geomaps, autonomous mobility) domains. He received the Lemelson Award (2016), ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award (2017), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2009), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2009), TR100 Award from MIT Technology Review (2004) and Global Indus Technovator Award (2003). He has worked on special research projects at Google [X] and Facebook and co-founded/advised several companies.

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Superman can fly and heroes can becomes invisible .. But what about a new power for a future super-hero ..
To see around corners ..

My idea is to use the multiple bounces of light i.e. echoes of light.

Echoes of sound -> Echoes of light

We all know about echoes of sound.
But sounds travels slow and we can actually hear the echoes
Light travels fast so we need specialized hardware to ‘listen’ to these echoes.
So we end up using light sources and cameras that run at a trillion frames per second (not a million and not a billion, but trillion)

Not just science fiction but we have actually shown this in our lab on a tabletop setup
The femto-camera is on the left and the mannequin is hidden behind the wall .. so how do we do it? Our paper was recently published and highlighted on nature.com and Nature produced this animation

Five on Five
= If more than five teams in the world are doing the same research, don’t do it.
= If you disappear for five years, will someone do it anyway? Then your idea is not that great anyway.
= Can you explain your work in five sentences to your grandma how it will impact human life?
= If you can explain the idea in five minutes to a student and disappear for five years, will s/he be able to do it on her/his own without additional input from you/without iterations .. It is too obvious and lacks depth .. Don’t do it.
= Strive to work on ideas that may require five+ disciplines .. Today’s research is highly team-driven and more diverse the required team composition, more fun you will have and also indicates a natural barrier to entry for others satisfying condition 1 and 2

Much like the food pyramid, five servings are the goal and will make you stronger .. But ok if your research project does not satisfy all five conditions

In imaging, lets start with the most fundamental that’s invisible .. Photons zipping at speed of light
So we built a camera and new type of imaging, femotophotography that can create moving of light in slow motion

What if we send this bullet of photons to shatter into this bottle
How does light look in slow motion
The whole sequence is less than a nanosecond stretched to about 10 seconds i.e. 10 billion times slowed down
If an oridinary bullet, same distance at such a slow motion video, do you know how long you will have to sit here to watch the movie? A day, a week .. a whole year .. it will be a very boring movie ..

Clean_coke_mulSlow2v1.mov

2014