The Lemelson–MIT Program awards several prizes yearly to inventors in the United States. The largest is the Lemelson–MIT Prize which was endowed in 1994 by Jerome H. Lemelson, funded by the Lemelson Foundation, and is administered through the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The winner receives $500,000, making it the largest cash prize for invention in the U.S.
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from technology, media, science, art, and design. As of 2014, Media lab's research groups include neurobiology, biologically inspired fabrication, socially engaging robots, emotive computing, bionics, and hyperinstruments.
The light field is a vector function that describes the amount of light flowing in every direction through every point in space. The space of all possible light rays is given by the five-dimensional plenoptic function, and the magnitude of each ray is given by its radiance. Michael Faraday was the first to propose that light should be interpreted as a field, much like the magnetic fields on which he had been working. The phrase light field was coined by Andrey Gershun in a classic 1936 paper on the radiometric properties of light in three-dimensional space.
Computational photography refers to digital image capture and processing techniques that use digital computation instead of optical processes. Computational photography can improve the capabilities of a camera, or introduce features that were not possible at all with film based photography, or reduce the cost or size of camera elements. Examples of computational photography include in-camera computation of digital panoramas, high-dynamic-range images, and light field cameras. Light field cameras use novel optical elements to capture three dimensional scene information which can then be used to produce 3D images, enhanced depth-of-field, and selective de-focusing. Enhanced depth-of-field reduces the need for mechanical focusing systems. All of these features use computational imaging techniques.
A high-speed camera is a device capable of capturing moving images with exposures of less than 1/1,000 second or frame rates in excess of 250 fps. It is used for recording fast-moving objects as photographic images onto a storage medium. After recording, the images stored on the medium can be played back in slow motion. Early high-speed cameras used photographic film to record the high-speed events, but have been superseded by entirely electronic devices using an image sensor, recording, typically, over 1,000 fps onto DRAM, to be played back slowly to study the motion for scientific study of transient phenomena.
Robert Samuel Langer Jr. FREng is an American biotechnologist, businessman, chemical engineer, chemist, and inventor. He is one of the twelve Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ashok Gadgil Is the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Chair and Professor of Safe Water and Sanitation at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Faculty Senior Scientist and has served as director of the Energy and Environmental Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Autostereoscopy is any method of displaying stereoscopic images without the use of special headgear, glasses, something that affects vision, or anything for eyes on the part of the viewer. Because headgear is not required, it is also called "glasses-free 3D" or "glassesless 3D". There are two broad approaches currently used to accommodate motion parallax and wider viewing angles: eye-tracking, and multiple views so that the display does not need to sense where the viewer's eyes are located. Examples of autostereoscopic displays technology include lenticular lens, parallax barrier, and may include Integral imaging, but notably do not include volumetric display or holographic displays.
The Lemelson Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) private foundation. It was started in 1993 by Jerome H. Lemelson and his wife Dorothy. The foundation held total net assets of US$444,124,049 at the end of 2020 and US$484,432,021 at the end of 2021.
A bokode is a type of data tag which holds much more information than a barcode over the same area. They were developed by a team led by Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab. Bokodes are intended to be read by any standard digital camera, focusing at infinity. With this optical setup, the tiny code appears large enough to read. Bokodes are readable from different angles and from 4 metres (13 ft) away.
A 3D display is multiscopic if it projects more than two images out into the world, unlike conventional 3D stereoscopy, which simulates a 3D scene by displaying only two different views of it, each visible to only one of the viewer's eyes. Multiscopic displays can represent the subject as viewed from a series of locations, and allow each image to be visible only from a range of eye locations narrower than the average human interocular distance of 63 mm. As a result, not only does each eye see a different image, but different pairs of images are seen from different viewing locations.
NETRA is a mobile eye diagnostic device developed at MIT Media Lab consisting of a clip-on eyepiece and a software app for smart phones. The co-inventors include Ramesh Raskar and Vitor Pamplona. It can be seen as the inverse of expensive Shack-Hartmann sensors. NETRA allows for the early, low-cost diagnosis of the most common refractive Refractive Disorders. The subject looks into the device and aligns patterns on the display. By repeating this procedure for eight meridians, the required refractive correction is computed. NETRA exploits the fact that aberrations are expressed using only a few parameters to create an easier user interaction approach. Leveraging mobile connectivity, the system can transmit test data to appropriate facilities for immediate action, aggregate data for use in analysis, or instruct a separate machine for automatic dispensing of spectacles.
Femto-photography is a technique for recording the propagation of ultrashort pulses of light through a scene at a very high speed (up to 1013 frames per second). A femto-photograph is equivalent to an optical impulse response of a scene and has also been denoted by terms such as a light-in-flight recording or transient image. Femto-photography of macroscopic objects was first demonstrated using a holographic process in the 1970s by Nils Abramsson at the Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden). A research team at the MIT Media Lab led by Ramesh Raskar, together with contributors from the Graphics and Imaging Lab at the Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, more recently achieved a significant increase in image quality using a streak camera synchronized to a pulsed laser and modified to obtain 2D images instead of just a single scanline.
John Werner is the founder of Ideas in Action, Inc. (IIA) and Managing Director at Link Ventures. Prior he was a Vice President at an augmented reality company. He is also founding Managing Director for MIT Media Lab's Emerging Worlds Special Interest Group (SIG), and former Head of Innovation and New Ventures for the Camera Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab for Ramesh Raskar, director of the Camera Culture Group at MIT Media Lab. He is one of the founding members of the non-profit organization Citizen Schools and the curator of TEDxBeaconStreet, and TEDxMIT with Daniela Rus - both independent event licensed by TED as part of TEDx. He started first ever AR-in-Action Augmented Reality Conference "ARIA" at MIT Media Lab in January 2017 and Blockchain+AI+Human = Magic Summit, now called Imagination in Action at MIT and Davos which he curates with Professor Sandy Pentland.
Epsilon photography is a form of computational photography wherein multiple images are captured with slightly varying camera parameters such as aperture, exposure, focus, film speed and viewpoint for the purpose of enhanced post-capture flexibility. The term was coined by Prof. Ramesh Raskar. The technique has been developed as an alternative to light field photography that requires no specialized equipment. Examples of epsilon photography include focal stack photography, High dynamic range (HDR) photography, lucky imaging, multi-image panorama stitching and confocal stereo. The common thread for all the aforementioned imaging techniques is that multiple images are captured in order to produce a composite image of higher quality, such as richer color information, wider-field of view, more accurate depth map, less noise/blur and greater resolution.
Light-in-flight imaging — a set of techniques to visualize propagation of light through different media.
Jay Saul Silver is an electrical engineer and toy inventor from Cocoa Beach, Florida. Silver is the Founder and CEO of JoyLabz and MaKey MaKey and was the first-ever Maker Research Scientist at Intel.
Hao Li is a computer scientist, innovator, and entrepreneur from Germany, working in the fields of computer graphics and computer vision. He is co-founder and CEO of Pinscreen, Inc, as well as associate professor of computer vision at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). He was previously a Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, and former director of the Vision and Graphics Lab at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. He was also a visiting professor at Weta Digital and a research lead at Industrial Light & Magic / Lucasfilm.
Alexis Lewis is an American inventor, repeat science fair winner and public speaker. She is best known for her advocacy for invention education and her humanitarian inventions. She is known to have given talks at the White House, Smithsonian, SXSW, National Maker Faire, the 2018 Social Innovation Summit, and at TEDx events. Lewis also gained repeat standing as a finalist or winner in national and international science and invention fairs, including the 2012 Broadcom MASTERS Challenge. In the course of the Spark!Lab Invent It Challenge, Lewis won pro-bono patent counsel, and holds a patent on the "Rescue Travois", granted 2015 and has one pending, on the "Emergency Mask Pod".
Todor G. Georgiev is a Bulgarian American research scientist and inventor, best known for his work on plenoptic cameras. He is the author of the Healing Brush tool in Adobe Photoshop, and, as of 2020, is a principal scientist at Adobe in San Jose, California. Georgiev's work has been cited 7700 times as of 2020. As an inventor, he has at least 89 patents to his name.
