Ramesh Raskar: Innovating for the Kumbh Mela

inktalks.com MIT Media Lab’s Ramesh Raskar and collaborators have stirred up communities in his hometown, Nashik, to work together on tech-centric solutions for the upcoming Kumbh Mela. INK Fellow Sunil Khandbahale and other innovators from the initiative join Raskar on stage to share some of their ingenious tech solutions to the challenges presented by this gathering of over 30 million people.
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ABOUT RAMESH RASKAR:
Ramesh Raskar is an Associate Professor at MIT Media Lab. Ramesh Raskar joined the Media Lab from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 2008 as head of the Lab’s Camera Culture research group. His research interests span the fields of computational photography, inverse problems in imaging and human-computer interaction. Recent projects and inventions include transient imaging to look around a corner, a next generation CAT-Scan machine, imperceptible markers for motion capture (Prakash), long distance barcodes (Bokode), touch+hover 3D interaction displays (BiDi screen), low-cost eye care devices (Netra,Catra), new theoretical models to augment light fields (ALF) to represent wave phenomena and algebraic rank constraints for 3D displays(HR3D).
In 2004, Raskar received the TR100 Award from Technology Review, which recognizes top young innovators under the age of 35, and in 2003, the Global Indus Technovator Award, instituted at MIT to recognize the top 20 Indian technology innovators worldwide. In 2009, he was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2010, he received the Darpa Young Faculty award. Other awards include Marr Prize honorable mention 2009, LAUNCH Health Innovation Award, presented by NASA, USAID, US State Dept and NIKE, 2010, Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project Award (first place), 2011. He holds over 40 US patents and has received four Mitsubishi Electric Invention Awards. He is currently co-authoring a book on Computational Photography.
ABOUT THE OTHER SPEAKERS:
SUNIL KHANDBAHALE
Sunil’s goal is to help Indians bridge the ‘language’ and ‘digital’ divides, due to the dominance of English on the internet and in technical published texts. He has developed digital dictionaries for mobile phones and computers with a repository of 9.6 million audio and textual words in 16 domains, like Legal, Agriculture and Pharmacy, in 22 different Indian languages. Educated in Marathi-medium in a village near Nashik, Sunil believes the root of the rural inferiority complex is the linguistic divide, due to which many abandon their education. He hopes to reverse this with his free platform.
GIRISH PAGARE
Girish is a metallurgical engineer working with Graphite India. With a rich experience of more than 28 years in the industry, espicallly in SQL and systems. He is the chairman of the Nasik chapter of the Computer Society of India.
SANDIP SHINDE
Sandip post-graduated in Computer Science and is working as a Program Manager in Tata Consultancy Service Ltd. He has more than decade experience in several technologies and large program implementations.
SACHIN PACHORKAR
Sachin is an associate professor in the Department of Management at KBT College of Engineering. He is a state-level winner of Avishkar Competition 2013 which was held in Dapoli University. Under the Project Green Street in Maharashtra he developed two innovative concepts, coconut express and Kool Kartz.

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Thanks for taking such a great step to save millions of life and make Kumbh mela a great success!