computational imaging

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a technique that captures a trillion frames per second, fast enough to show light itself moving through a scene. He discusses possible uses such as cameras that see around corners or inside the body.

Joscha Bach's 32C3 talk applies computational theories of mind to questions of meaning, emotion, and love, asking how computation can explain irrational-seeming human experience.

A Disney Research SIGGRAPH 2013 demo of an interactive system that lets non-experts design animated mechanical characters. The user sketches motion curves and the system generates optimized mechanisms and gear trains for 3D printing.

An 11-minute animated introduction to P vs. NP and the wider landscape of complexity classes, inspired by the Complexity Zoo wiki. It assumes no background in computer science.

The SIGGRAPH 2005 demo of dual photography from Stanford, which swaps the roles of projector and camera to render a scene from the light's point of view. It includes the reveal of a hidden playing card.

Robert Erdmann, a materials scientist at the Rijksmuseum, gives a PyCon keynote on the ultra-high-resolution imaging of Rembrandt's Night Watch. He covers the automated gantry camera system, the Python software that drives it, and the large volumes of image data involved.

Inventor Mary Lou Jepsen demonstrates using red light and sound to see inside the body and brain, aiming at tumor detection and neural activity measurement, and potentially a cheaper wearable MRI replacement.

Explains the proposed NASA JPL plan to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, sending solar sail craft to its focal region to image an exoplanet's surface. It covers the distances involved, how imaging with the Sun would work and the mission design.

The first lecture in an 18-part series on digital photography from Marc Levoy's Stanford CS 178 course, recorded at Google in 2016. The series covers how digital cameras work and computational photography, with slides and assignments available on the course site.

Joscha Bach's 31c3 talk argues that the mind should be understood as an information-processing system and that even the physical universe can be seen as computational. It tours the philosophy underlying artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Psychiatrist Daniel Amen discusses lessons from 83,000 brain scans, arguing that brain activity patterns relate to psychological symptoms and that you can improve your brain.

MIT Media Lab shows an imaging system capturing a trillion frames per second, fast enough to film light pulses travelling through objects in slow motion.

PBS Space Time explains the proposal to use the Sun's gravity as a giant lens, sending a train of small light-sail spacecraft to the focal point roughly 550 AU out. It covers how such a telescope could image exoplanets in surprising detail and the engineering challenges involved.

A long Lex Fridman interview with Stephen Wolfram on complexity, cellular automata, computational irreducibility and the Wolfram Physics Project.

A short film made with cold neutron imaging at the Paul Scherrer Institut showing a moka pot brewing coffee, sped up four times. The neutron beam makes the water and steam inside the pot visible.

Joscha Bach's 35C3 talk offers an AI perspective on the soul, covering perception, mental representation, agency, consciousness and selfhood as things that can arise in a computational system like the brain.

UCLA professor Dario Nardi presents brain-imaging research suggesting that different Myers-Briggs personality types use their brains in different ways. He discusses how each type can reach a state of creative flow. It is aimed at a general audience.

Veritasium shows what the world looks like through a UV camera. It covers how pigments absorb UV, how fluorescence works, and how UV imaging reveals sunscreen effectiveness and skin damage.

Veritasium explains what a black hole should look like, using J.P. Luminet's 1979 work and a cardboard 3D model to show how light bends around it. It was made just as the first black hole image was released.

A DEF CON 21 talk by Adam Laurie and Zac Franken on decapping chips, covering how to remove chip packaging and image the die to read out contents such as ROM.

Tom Murphy's satirical SIGBOVIK 2007 presentation, delivered under a pseudonym, proving that generalized Super Mario Bros. is NP-complete. It is a short, deadpan take on a complexity theory result.

Christian Schafmeister's Google Tech Talk on Clasp and CANDO, a Common Lisp implementation on LLVM and C++ used to design molecules, including energy minimization and force-field calculations.

A roughly four-and-a-half-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Stephen Wolfram about his Wolfram Physics Project and a fundamental theory of physics, computation, life and the universe.

Veritasium visits the US Navy's Crane facility to test top night vision goggles. It explains how image intensifier tubes and thermal or digital systems work and compares the generations of the technology.

Christian Schafmeister presents CANDO at the 2016 European Lisp Symposium. It is a compiled Lisp-based language for designing macromolecules and nanoscale materials, built on the Clasp implementation of Common Lisp.

Technology Connections explains how refrigerator and freezer design affects energy use, using chest freezers to show why top-opening designs and layout choices matter. It includes thermal-camera footage of cold air spilling out of upright units.

The Slow Mo Guys visit a lab with a camera capable of filming at 10 trillion frames per second, fast enough to see light travel. They show the setup and the resulting footage.

AlphaPhoenix shows off a new camera that films at two billion frames per second and uses it to film a laser pointer pulse. He investigates a strange quirk in how the speed of light appears on camera.

A short conference talk from !!Con 2017 in which Kevin Chen explains the HDR imaging algorithm from a foundational paper, framing it as a system of linear equations, and implements it in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. No prior image processing knowledge is needed.

Guy Steele presents a small geometric problem and compares four computational approaches: a classic sequential solution and three parallel-friendly ones. Each is illustrated pictorially and with working code, weighing total work against time to solution.

Matt Might's Curry On talk on ending errors in code, both software and the human genome. He covers conservative approximation of the halting problem via static analysis and a computational approach to precision medicine.

Tom Scott-style exploration by suckerpinch (Tom7) of generalized anagrams where letters can be broken into pieces, called anagraphs, with a whimsical computational approach.

Andrew Sorensen's OSCON 2014 keynote in which he live-codes generative music on stage using his Impromptu environment while narrating his computational and musical choices. It imagines concert programmers as a performing art.

AlphaPhoenix uses Monte Carlo simulation and annealing-style methods to draw North Carolina congressional district maps, both gerrymandered and fair. He focuses on the fascinating computational problem rather than the politics.

A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.

Nathan Kutz presents the spatio-temporal dynamics of rotating detonation rocket engines, including combustion fronts that behave like solitons. He shows a bifurcation analysis of a multiscale model that captures the main features.

A family video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a parent follows them exactly as written, with comic results. It demonstrates how precise instructions must be.

Isaac Arthur explains the Matrioshka Brain, a hypothetical computer or artificial mind powered by an entire star using nested shells. It covers how such megastructures relate to Dyson spheres and superintelligence.

IBM's record-setting stop-motion film made by moving individual carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunneling microscope, illustrating atomic-scale memory research.

A SIGGRAPH demo from Yoichi Ochiai's group of aerial and volumetric graphics drawn by focused femtosecond lasers with computational holography. The plasma points can be touched.