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.
In photography, bokeh is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in out-of-focus parts of an image, whether foreground or background or both. It is created by using a wide aperture lens.
Jerome "Jerry" Hal Lemelson was an American engineer, inventor, and patent holder. Several of his inventions relate to warehouses, industrial robots, cordless telephones, fax machines, videocassette recorders, camcorders, and the magnetic tape drive. Lemelson's 605 patents made him one of the most prolific inventors in American history.
A light field, or lightfield, is a vector function that describes the amount of light flowing in every direction through every point in a 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 term 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 frames per second. 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, typically recording over 1 000 frames per second 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 nine 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.
Amy Smith is an American inventor, educator, and founder of the MIT D-Lab and senior lecturer of mechanical engineering at MIT.
Willard Sterling Boyle, was a Canadian physicist. He was a pioneer in the field of laser technology and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. As director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at Bellcomm he helped select lunar landing sites and provided support for the Apollo space program.
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 integral imaging. Volumetric and holographic displays are also autostereoscopic, as they produce a different image to each eye, although some do make a distinction between those types of displays that create a vergence-accommodation conflict and those that do not.
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. The Foundation seeks to harness the power of invention and innovation to accelerate climate action and improve lives around the world.
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.
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.
Balaji Sampath is an Indian educationist, social activist, the founder and secretary of a non-profit Organization, Association for India's Development, India chapter, an India-based NGO that carries out science teaching and primary school programs for children to aid their educational development.
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.
