Randy Sargent will speak on

"Mars Gigapans and Time Machines"

with Saman Amraii

Digital Imagers and Student SIGGRAPH Meeting

Sunday Sept. 2, 2012 at 1:15, Pitt Scaife Hall, Room 1102

Description:

Since Viking landed in 1976, humans have been building panoramas from the Martian surface. Join an exploration of some of the highlights of our visits to Mars, including images from the newly landed Mars Science Laboratory rover "Curiosity". We'll also give some technical details about the imaging systems aboard the 7 devices humans have successfully landed on the planet Mars!

Saman Amraii , an intern at CMU CREATE Lab, will show and discuss the Terapixel Time Machine, which makes GigaPan panoramas in time, creating a time based database of hugh size. Time panoramas of Pittsburgh will be shown and discussed!

Randy Sargent Biography:

Randy Sargent developed the technology for GigaPan, a low-cost robotic gigapixel panorama imager, while working at NASA Ames Research Center as engineering lead for autonomous instrument placement for the K9 prototype Mars rover. While there he also built image analysis and visualization tools used as part of the Mars Exploration Rover mission. He joined Carnegie Mellon University in 2005, holding the position of Senior Systems Scientist. There he works on explorable "big data" within the CREATE Lab with the Time Machine terapixel timelapse project, the BodyTrack self-tracking project and the GigaPan gigapixel panoramic imaging project. Randy received his BS in Computer Science from MIT, and his MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, where he developed the programmable LEGO Brick under sponsorship from LEGO, leading to the commercial LEGO Mindstorms robot construction kit.

Saman Amraii Biography

Saman Amraii is an intern at Carnegie Mellon University's CREATE Lab, where he works on computational approaches for terapixel-scale, explorable timelapse imagery as part of the Time Machine Project. He is a PhD student in the Intelligent Systems Program at the University of Pittsburgh, working on swarm intelligence and human interaction with a swarm of robots. He received a silver medal in Iran's National Chemistry Olympiad as a high school student at Iran's National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents and other recognition and awards. He received BS from Amikabir University of Technoog y, and MS in Artificial Intelligence and Robots from University of Teran.