Ramesh Raskar is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology associate professor and head of the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture research group. Previously he worked as a senior research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) during 2002 to 2008. He holds 132 patents in computer vision, computational health, sensors and imaging. He received the $500K Lemelson–MIT Prize in 2016. The prize money will be used for launching REDX.io, a group platform for co-innovation in Artificial Intelligence. He is well known for inventing EyeNetra (mobile device to calculate spectacle glasses prescription), EyeCatra (cataract screening) and EyeSelfie (retinal imaging), Femto-photography (trillion frames per second imaging) and his TED talk for cameras to see around corners.
In February 2020, Raskar and his team launched Private Kit: SafePaths, a public health tool for contact tracing for COVID-19 pandemic. He is also the Founder and Chief Scientist of PathCheck. He is a co-founder of Akasha.im which was acquired by Alphabet spin-off company Intrinsic.
Early life and education
Ramesh Raskar was born in Nashik, India and he finished his engineering education from College of Engineering, Pune. He finished his PhD at UNC Chapel Hill in 2002.
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
Raskar joined Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 2002. His significant contribution in computer vision and imaging domain led him to win 'TR 100' in 2004, 'The Global Indus Technovator Award' in 2004 respectively.
MIT Media Lab
Raskar joined MIT Media Lab in 2008. Raskar, together with others developed a computational display technology that allows observers with refractive errors, cataracts and some other eye disorders to perceive a focused image on a screen without wearing refraction-corrective spectacles. The technology uses a light field display in combination with customized filtering algorithms that pre-distort the presented content for the observer.
His lab produced a number of extreme highspeed pictures using a femto-camera that took images at around one-trillion frames per second. They have also developed a camera to see around corners using bursts of laser light.
Juliett Fiss has covered his role as the catalyst behind the Siggraph NEXT program at Siggraph 2015 in Los Angeles.
Raskar was awarded the "2017 CG Achievement Award" by ACM SIGGRAPH for his potential contribution in computational photography and light transport and their applications for social impact.
He has been influential in deploying research ideas in the real world. Startups created by members of his CameraCulture research group include EyeNetra.com (ophthalmic tests), Photoneo (high speed 3D sensing), Labby (AI for food testing), Lumii (novel printing for 3D imagery), LensBricks (computer vision with computational imaging), Tesseract (personalized display) and more. Non-profits emerging from his efforts include REDX.io (AI for Social Impact), MIT Emerging Worlds, LVP-MITra, REDX-WeSchool, DigitalImpactSquare and more.
He serves on the Expert Commission of $3.5 Billion Botnar Fondation as AI and Health expert.
Philosophies on innovation
Raskar has presented a series of talks and workshops on innovation processes.
They include his Idea Hexagon, How to give an engaging talk, How to prepare for a thesis, How to write a paper and the Spot-Probe method for problem-solution identification. In 2019, he presented doctoral hooding commencement speech at UNC Chapel Hill.