Farhan Baqai

In a relatively short period of time, the digital camera has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. The pace at which innovations are being made in this area is remarkable. The exciting aspect is that there is much more to come. In this talk, we review the evolution of digital cameras from camera obscura to film to digital to mobile. Along the way, we identify events that precipitated the change to a digital photography ecosystem. We briefly discuss practices and assumptions that are prevalent in the scientific community and look at a few signal processing solutions that we have developed over the years for problems in digital photography. Using these examples we demonstrate the multidisciplinary nature of digital camera image processing. We present recent results to show the progress that has been achieved in computational photography on mobile cameras and conclude with challenges and opportunities.

Biography:

Farhan Baqai earned a M.S. and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University. Before that, he received the Master of Engineering Science degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia and the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. After his PhD, he worked on halftoning algorithms for inkJet printers at Xerox Corporation and on digital camera image processing at the Sony US Research Center. Currently he is a Senior Research Manager at Apple Inc. where he leads a research group focused on the development of state of the art algorithms for digital photography.

Dr. Baqai’s research and product contributions span digital camera image processing, machine learning, computer vision, stereoscopic image processing, statistical signal processing, digital printing, and radar imaging. He has been the driving force behind several key technologies for Apple and Sony. His algorithms have been implemented in hardware, firmware, and software. Dr. Baqai’s innovations have shipped in more than a billion devices which are being used to capture trillions of images every year.

Dr. Baqai is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a Deputy Editor in Chief (2023-present) of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. Dr. Baqai sits on the IEEE Fellow Committee (2024-present) and on IEEE SPS Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee (2020-present). He served as a Member of IEEE SPS Industry DSP Technology Standing Committee (2007-2014) and was Publicity Co-Chair of 2012 IEEE Conference on Image Processing. Dr. Baqai has authored several peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and holds 40 issued US patents with more than 10 US patents pending.

In 2020, the Purdue University Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering conferred on him its Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer (OECE) award. More details can be found on his LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/farhanbaqai/.

Jose Luis Marín

Biography:

Jose Luis Marín is a Telecommunications Engineer (Msc) and holds a degree in Business Management (Bsc). He has more than 25 years of experience in various companies related to consulting, technology, and innovation. He currently works as the Head of Digitalization Strategy, Data, and AI at Madison MK.

He has been acting as an expert evaluator of Research and Innovation projects for the European Commission for more than 15 years and has led more than 18 R&D&I projects based on technologies associated with Cloud computing, Big Data, Data Science, and Artificial Intelligence. On the other hand, he is the author of several publications such as the book “Web 2.0: A simple description of the changes we are experiencing” and co-author of “Open Data: Reuse of public information” (Netbiblo).

He frequently engages in initiatives aimed at fostering innovation and promoting open knowledge, such as those related to the Open Data movement. He has been a speaker at events such as FICOD09, PSI Meeting 2010, 1st EU Digital Agenda Assembly, and at universities such as Oviedo, La Laguna, Murcia, Almería, or Girona, advocating for the release of public sector data in open and reusable formats.

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/joseluismarin

Hariprasad Anumala

Biography:

Hariprasad Anumala, Assistant Vice President – Reliance Jio,   leads product and engineering teams for Reliance Jio Smart Home and Enterprise IoT Solutions. He has led product and solution development on connectivity solutions from ideation to scale at Samsung Electronics.

He represented Samsung Electronics in various developer conferences for technical talks on P2P connectivity solutions. He has played a key role in the global deployment of Rich Communication Suite (RCS) service for Samsung, including a demonstration of the world's first RCS Mobile Client at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. I have more than ten patents in IMS, M2M, IoT, and Data convergence areas and have published various papers at IEEE conferences.

Rahul Soundrarajan

Biography:

Rahul Soundrarajan is a Principal Engineer with Tejas Networks, responsible for solution architecture of RAN Observability, RIC Apps and AI/ML for Radio. Prior to this, he was an entrepreneur and independent research consultant. He has designed, developed and evaluated ML Algorithms for NearRT RIC, Non-RT RIC and network optimization use cases for which he holds several patents. His career spanning 23 years is a rich mix of Systems Architecture and Engineering of 2G-5G RAN, and application of ML in Telecom, Computer Vision and Sensor Fusion.