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Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

engineering.princeton.edu

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Re: Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

#71

Post by guerrilla »

randomsearch wrote: post #58
shrimpx wrote: post #6

That guy Felix Heide is a research powerhouse. He and his group published 4 papers in SIGGRAPH 21, 7 papers in CVPR 21 and 6 papers in CVPR 2020, wow. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~fheide/

I know nothing of his work, and he may well be an excellent researcher, but the use of “number of papers published” as a proxy for the quality of someone’s research is one of the biggest problems in academia. What matters is the precise nature of a researcher’s work, which is a qualitative measure that cannot be summarised with a simplistic metric. It’s so odd that we even discuss such things; it’s an overused analog…

Those weren't just papers published but papers published at elite conferences. Each one must be a serious contribution.

Re: Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

#72

Post by derbOac »

shrimpx wrote: post #59
voxl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://light.princeton.edu/team/ Visiting professor, 3 postdocs, and 9 PhD students, all of very high quality (because, well they're at Princeton). My guess is each postdoc could produce 1 to 2 papers a year on there own. A PhD student at such a difficult school can probably produce one paper a year once they are in there third year. 14 publications in 2021. Let's guess 6 of which are from postdocs, we'll say 4 of w…

The way it likely works is the prof drives the vast majority of idea/IP development and the students do the work under the prof's guidance. Then the prof "frames" the paper and does part of the writing, especially in intro and conclusion sections. These profs likely don't drive any solo projects and don't do any prof-prof collaborations without students involved.

The problem is we will never know what really happened.

This model leads to a necessary accrual of credit to more senior researchers because the default assumption is to assume credit of a group to the more senior individual.

The problem is there's no way (or less way) for the less senior individual to establish credit unless they are publishing on their own, which isn't feasible.

In this way, group efforts tend to trickle toward the person in the senior position, and credit accrues to people in management of large groups irrespective of where ideas are coming from or who is doing the work. We say "someone is a great scientist" because they have an administrative position with reference to a large group.

Whoever has the most papers with the largest groups wins.

Re: Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

#74

Post by randomsearch »

boibombeiro wrote: post #67
randomsearch wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know nothing of his work, and he may well be an excellent researcher, but the use of “number of papers published” as a proxy for the quality of someone’s research is one of the biggest problems in academia. What matters is the precise nature of a researcher’s work, which is a qualitative measure that cannot be summarised with a simplistic metric. It’s so odd that we even discuss such things; it’s an overused analog…

The parent post used the number of papers at the top conferences in their respectives fields. It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken. I see your point though. This is a recurrent discussion. I think the change of paradigm was positive. Nowadays, papers are published in interactive and incremental way, instead of, doing a parallel with software engineering…

> It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken.

I agree with this statement: the system is completely broken.

I've peered inside top level conferences and I can tell you that publishing there does not mean you are pushing the state of the art. Instead you may be: popular, good at playing the political game, lucky (when acceptance rates are low, luck plays a huge part - and why they are low is a story in itself), good at writing marketing copy rather than doing science, engaging in corruption to get your paper accepted, or playing to the gallery in a way that might even harm science.

More widely, if your field is 99% politicians and 1% scientists, then the _scientific_ barrier to entry at an elite conference is not going to be a good endorsement of your work.

Re: Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

#75

Post by derbOac »

boibombeiro wrote: post #67
randomsearch wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know nothing of his work, and he may well be an excellent researcher, but the use of “number of papers published” as a proxy for the quality of someone’s research is one of the biggest problems in academia. What matters is the precise nature of a researcher’s work, which is a qualitative measure that cannot be summarised with a simplistic metric. It’s so odd that we even discuss such things; it’s an overused analog…

The parent post used the number of papers at the top conferences in their respectives fields. It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken. I see your point though. This is a recurrent discussion. I think the change of paradigm was positive. Nowadays, papers are published in interactive and incremental way, instead of, doing a parallel with software engineering…

The problem isn't the incremental nature of the papers or the collaboration, it's the equating of scientist quality with numbers of publications (or something like it).

By your own analogy, it would be like saying "someone is a great computer scientist" based on the number of commits they or their colleagues make.

I might even argue that regardless of how the product is or is not improved by the process, the way we attribute credit is worse.

If you move to a collaborative incremental process but still talk in terms of specific individuals as the source, rather than a group, there's a problem.

Re: Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

#76

Post by randomsearch »

guerrilla wrote: post #71
randomsearch wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know nothing of his work, and he may well be an excellent researcher, but the use of “number of papers published” as a proxy for the quality of someone’s research is one of the biggest problems in academia. What matters is the precise nature of a researcher’s work, which is a qualitative measure that cannot be summarised with a simplistic metric. It’s so odd that we even discuss such things; it’s an overused analog…

Those weren't just papers published but papers published at elite conferences. Each one must be a serious contribution.

> Each one must be a serious contribution

I'm sorry to inform you that this is untrue. Elite conferences are full of work that is _scientifically_ awful and does not contribute anything to _science_.

Re: Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

#77

Post by [deleted] »

inter_netuser wrote: post #12
williamtrask wrote: post #3

…something something privacy…

even if banned legally, the amounts of illegal surveillance will be mindboggling. It'll only keep shrinking, until it is the size of dust particles, just another order of magnitude. How do you prevent dust-cameras from being around? a pre-emptive EMP pulse lol?

[deleted]

Re: Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

#78

Post by [deleted] »

randomsearch wrote: post #74
boibombeiro wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent post used the number of papers at the top conferences in their respectives fields. It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken. I see your point though. This is a recurrent discussion. I think the change of paradigm was positive. Nowadays, papers are published in interactive and incremental way, instead of, doing a parallel with software engineering…

> It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken. I agree with this statement: the system is completely broken. I've peered inside top level conferences and I can tell you that publishing there does not mean you are pushing the state of the art. Instead you may be: popular, good at playing the political game, lucky (when acceptance rates are low, luck plays a hug…

[deleted]

Re: Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

#79

Post by choeger »

randomsearch wrote: post #76
guerrilla wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those weren't just papers published but papers published at elite conferences. Each one must be a serious contribution.

> Each one must be a serious contribution I'm sorry to inform you that this is untrue. Elite conferences are full of work that is _scientifically_ awful and does not contribute anything to _science_.

That's not true in general.

Case in point:

https://icfp21.sigplan.org/track/icfp-2021-papers#event-over...

the key is that "elite" in science means "small", amongst other things. Any conference that accepts so many papers that not very attendant can visit every presentation is already not "elite" anymore.

Re: Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

#80

Post by ISL »

alted wrote: post #33
dtgriscom wrote: post #13

The article keeps saying "camera", but we only see the lens. How big is the sensor and cabling?

The full setup is in the supplementary information (available at the bottom of the main paper website [1]), Figure 7. After this small lens, there are a couple more large lenses before the final camera/sensor, apparently an AVT Proscilica GT1930C (which is not tiny---the full setup would be maybe ~200mm in length). So basically, yep, this work is just about a better tiny lens; the press article is misleading (the pap…

Fig. 7 is definitely where it's at -- I had the same question, as a camera is not just a lens, but a camera obscura[1], both the lens and the 'dark box' within which an image is formed.

My impression is that their metasurface lens has approximately a 1 mm focal-length. In the diagram, the light appears to pass through an intermediate focus at that distance, which they then pick up with another optical system for control/convenience.

I don't see anything that would, in principle, prevent using the metasurface lens as a component of a tiny camera. Nature has certainly evolved imaging systems that are smaller and modern sensor technology permits wavelength-scale pixels. With maximum charity, it appears that this lens/methodology might be used to yield a ~1-2 Mpx imaging system with a 1 mm f/2 optical system.

The claimed advance here appears to be that the combination of their lens and processing yields higher quality imaging at these physical scales than prior work.

It does indeed appear that in combination with a tiny imaging sensor, this lens could yield a camera the size of a large salt-grain.

This entire field of engineering appears to be in a golden decade; it may not be too long before we start seeing metasurface optics in consumer imaging products.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/camera

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