Three weeks in and Andrew Hyde is starting to sneak up on TechStars companies and record them in their natural environments. Last night he caught us at around 9pm and captured this brief podcast. Listen in to hear about our first three weeks.
Here's an old video of the rear-projection physics whiteboard referenced in the podcast. Maybe one of these days we'll set it up in the Bunker and record the creative madness that ensues.
Abhishek Gandhi will also be joining Fluxcapacity later this month as a summer intern. He is a master’s student at Columbia University who has studied computer vision and artificial intelligence, among other things.
His resume is impressive and we could really sense his passion for computer vision. He is able to think on his feet – during his interview he invented a new set of symbols to express conditional probability, since it’d been a while since he used more traditional ones.
Recently, Abhishek has been working in augmented reality (AR).
Left: Here, Abhishek uses ARToolkit and XNA to correctly position virtual cubes. Right: 3D pose is estimated without the need for specialized markers.
Abhishek likes foreign language films, good books, and hikes around the parks to escape from the city. Both Abhishek and Shun are going to do some amazing things this summer. Until then, good luck to them on their finals!
We were lucky enough to have a lot of interest for our intern positions. Last month was filled with interviews. There were simply no bad candidates, and we had to make some tough choices. We're set with interns for now, but we're perpetually interested in finding the perfect team.
We found Shun at Columbia University, where he's a master's student of computer science in the vision and graphics track.
Shun has worked on a lot of interesting projects, but what we thought was especially cool was his work with Professor Aoki at Tohoku University in Japan. There he designed a system using a projector and stereo camera that compensates for the photometric characteristics of a projected surface. What that means is that using what Shun's lab created you can use a projector with a non-white and non-uniform surface, like a brick wall, and still have it look good! Here's an example:
From left to right are the display surface, the original image, the image projected onto the display surface without compensation, the compensated image, and the compensated image projected onto the display surface.
When he's not working on hard computer vision problems, you can probably find Shun taking long walks around the city to clear his mind.
Shun really impressed us during the interview with his quick and creative responses to our tough algorithm question. He was even prepared with his old research paper when we asked about interesting projects that he had worked on. We are thrilled to work with him this summer.
A lot has changed in the last few months. We want to mention that Adam Herscher left in early January to pursue other opportunities. We wish him the best. More news coming soon.
