CS&E Colloquium: Vishwanath Saragadam

This week's speaker, Vishwanath Saragadam (Rice University), will be giving a talk titled, "Co-designing Optics and Algorithms for High-dimensional Visual Computing".

Abstract

The past two decades have seen tremendous advances in computer vision, all powered by the ubiquitous RGB sensor. However, the richness of visual information goes beyond just the spatial dimensions. A complete description requires representing the data with multiple independent variables including space, angle, spectrum, polarization, and time. Building cameras that leverage these dimensions of light will not only dramatically improve vision applications of today, but will also be key to unlocking new capabilities across multiple domains such as  robotics, augmented and virtual reality, biomedical imaging, security and biometrics, and environmental monitoring. 

Cameras for sampling such high dimensions need to solve three big challenges – (1) how do we sense multiple dimensions in an efficient manner (2) how do we model the data concisely, and (3) how do we build algorithms that scale to such high dimensions. In this talk, I will be introducing my work on high-dimensional visual computing that focuses on sampling, modeling, and inferring of visual data beyond the RGB. My talk will focus on the synergy across three key thrusts: modeling high-dimensional interactions with neural representations, building new optics and cameras with meta-optics, and inferring while sensing with optical computing. The ideas presented in the talk will pave the way for the future of computer vision where cameras do not merely sense but are part of the computing pipeline.

Biography

Vishwanath Saragadam is a postdoctoral researcher at Rice University with Prof. Richard G. Baraniuk and Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan. Vishwanath’s research is at the intersection of  computational imaging, meta-optics, and neural representations, and focuses on co-designing optics, sensors, and algorithms for solving challenging problems in vision. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Aswin Sankaranarayanan, where his thesis won the A. G. Jordan outstanding thesis award in 2020. Vishwanath is a recipient of the best paper award at ICCP 2022, Prabhu and Poonam Goel graduate fellowship in 2019, and an outstanding teaching assistant award in 2018. In his free time, Vishwanath likes following James Webb Telescope updates, capturing thermal images while baking, and biking long distances.