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In 2012 I was invited to give the commencement address at the
2012 Doctoral Hooding Ceremony of the University of North Carolina
(from which I graduated with a doctorate in 1989). UNC has two
university-wide commencement exercises; this one is for the graduate school.
The speaker for the 2012
undergraduate commencement was New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.
After the ceremony a number of people asked for the text of my address. Here
it is, retrospectively titled
"Where do disruptive ideas come from?".
Or here is
UNC's version,
with more photos like the one at left.
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In 1999 the National Academies published
Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. This
landmark study, sometimes called the Brooks-Sutherland report, argued that
research in computer science often takes 15 years to pay off. The
iconic illustration
from that report is reproduced at right. In 1996
Pat Hanrahan and I begin
working on
light fields and synthetic focusing, supported by the National Science
Foundation. In 2005
Ren Ng, a PhD student in our lab, worked out an optical design that allowed
dense light fields to be captured by a handheld camera. This design enabled
everyday photographs to be refocused after they are captured. In 2006 Ren
started a company called Refocus Imaging to commercialize this technology. In
2011 that company, now called Lytro, announced
its first camera. So 15 years from initial idea to first product. An exciting
ride, but a long wait. At left is a picture I took using the Lytro.
Click here for my
public page of Lytro pictures.
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My research has recently focused on
making cameras programmable.
One concrete outcome of this project is our Frankencamera
architecture, published in this
SIGGRAPH 2010 paper.
To help me understand the challenges of building photographic applications for
a mobile platform, I tried writing a cell phone app myself. The result is SynthCam. By capturing, tracking, aligning, and
blending a sequence of video frames, the app makes the near-pinhole aperture on
an iPhone camera act like the large aperture of a single-lens-reflex (SLR)
camera. This includes the SLR's shallow depth of field and resistance to noise
in low light. The app is available for $0.99 in the iTunes app store. I don't
expect to get rich from this app, but I learned a lot by writing it,
and seeing it appear in the app store was a thrill.
(Update - it's now free.)
Here are a few of my favorite reviews of the app:
MIT Technology Review,
WiReD,
The Economist.
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Portrait photographer
Louis Fabian Bachrach took some nice photographs (here and
here) of me in 1997
for the Computer Museum in Boston (now closed). I do occasionally wear
something besides blue dress shirts. Here are shots with other shirts, from
August 2001 and
July 2003.
Yes, that's a Death Ride T-shirt in the
last shot. I also rode in 2005, and yes, I finished all 5 passes - 15,000 feet
of climbing. That's why I'm smiling in the official ride photograph (shown at
left), taken at the top of Carson Pass after 12 hours of cycling.
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A small collection of
digital and computational photographs I've taken. Not all of them were
shot with a fancy SLR; the photograph at left is from a Nokia N95 cell
phone. And here are some group photos with
colleagues and students.
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Some
photographic essays about personal aspects of my 1998-99
sabbatical in Italy.
During the year abroad I
learned to carve in marble.
At left is my first piece - a mortar with decorated supports.
And here are some sculptures by
my mother,
who unlike me has real talent.
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I've been measuring and rendering 3D objects for a long time.
Here are some drawings I made in college for the
Historic American Buildings Survey.
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I still like finding and measuring old objects, especially if it involves
getting dirty. This photographic essay describes a week I spent on an
archaeological dig
in the Roman Forum. The image at left, taken during the dig,
graces the front cover of
The Bluffer's Guide to Archaeology.
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My favorite radio interview, by Noah Adams of National Public Radio's All Things
Considered - about the diverging gaze directions of the two eyes in
Michelangelo's David (June 13, 2000). (Click to hear the interview using
RealAudio at
14.4Kbs or
28.8Kbs, or as a
.wav file.)
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This interview, by Guy Raz, weekend host of All Things Considered, runs a close
second. It's about the
Frankencamera (October 11, 2009),
pictured at left.
(Click here for NPR's
web page containing the story and pictures,
and here for a direct link to the audio as an
.mp3 file.)
Finally, here's a text-only
interview at SIGGRAPH 2003, by Wendy Ju,
with reminiscences of my early mentors in computer graphics.
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Speaking of computer graphics, I'm fond of the front cover of the
Siggraph 2001 proceedings.
The image is from a paper (in the proceedings) on
subsurface scattering,
co-authored with Henrik Wann Jensen, Steve Marschner, and Pat Hanrahan.
And check out this milk.
This paper won a Technical Academy Award in 2004.
Subsurface scattering is now ubiquitous in CG-intensive movies.
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However, not everything went smoothly at Siggraph 2001. A
more-strenuous-than-expected after-Siggraph hike inspired Pat Hanrahan's and my
students to create this humorous movie poster. Click
here for the innocent version of
this story. And here for the real
story.
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A lot of my research relates to volume data. The cause may be genetic. My
mother's cousin David Chesler is credited with the first demonstration of
filtered backprojection, the dominant method used in computed
tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) for combining multiple
projections to yield 3D medical data. Here is a description of his
contributions.
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My father's genes also seem to be guiding my research tastes. Optics has been
in my family for four generations. My father Barton Monroe Levoy and my
grandfather Monroe Benjamin Levoy were opticians and sellers of eyeglasses
through their company, Tura. At left is an early
brochure.
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Going back further, my great-grandfather Benjamin Monroe Levoy sold eyeglasses,
cameras, microscopes, and other optical instruments in New York City a century
ago. Here is a piece of stationery from his store. He later
moved to 42nd street, as evidenced by the address on the case of these
eyeglasses, remade as pince-nez with a retractor.
(At left is a closeup of the embossed address.)
And here is a
wooden box
he used to mail eyeglasses to customers.
The stamp is dated 1902.
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In the drawing (at left)
illustrating that stationary, I believe you can see a microscope. In
any case I have an old microscope from his store. This
specimen of a silkworm mouth,
which accompanied the microscope, appears in our SIGGRAPH 2006 paper on light field
microscopy.
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My great-grandfather apparently also sold binoculars from the store. This pair, made by Jena Glass about 100
years ago and inscribed with the name B.M. Levoy, New York, was recovered by
a SWAT team during a drug raid in South Florida in 2008. They have undoubtedly
passed through many hands during their long and storied life. It would be
fascinating to watch a video of everything these lenses have seen.
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