ISBI Daily - Saturday

success when they work at the intersection of two fields, instead of trying to beat the hundreds of really smart people who have worked on the same problem for decades. If you try to do something that other people haven’t tried to do, you can have a lot more impact and you don’t have to be as smart to succeed. [ Laughs ] I think working at intersections of fields is very valuable. Conference-wise, go and ask questions, ask dumb questions, go and meet people, go find the people whose papers you’ve read. It just makes the whole community more interesting. Don’t be afraid to talk to the famous people, even if they blow you off! [ Laughs ] They don’t actually, they are generally very, very kind. In my experience at least. The more senior they are, the kinder they are. [ Laughs ] Sometimes! Over the relatively short history of computational imaging, have you witnessed any major breakthroughs you could tell us about? It’s such a broad array of applications, so it’s kind of hard to say. Impact-wise, computational imaging is becoming commercial through computational photography. The Pixel 2 camera is full of computational imaging, the iPhone camera is now, everyone’s getting into 3D, changing depth of field, changing perspective, all these cute tricks you can play to make your cell phone camera almost as good as your fancy DSLR. These are all computational imaging successes in commercial stuff. It’s also being used in MRI now and some medical imaging. Some of the most powerful microscopes use computational imaging now, like super-resolution, which won a Nobel Prize, so these things are big successes for computational imaging. Making things cheaper, simpler and easier has been a big success of computational imaging. You can replace expensive systems with cheap ones. Can you tell us about any breakthroughs we might see coming up? The field now is working on lots of major problems, like imaging through scattering and seeing around corners . Laura Waller ISBI DAILY Saturday 5 “… go and ask questions, ask dumb questions, go and meet people, go find the people whose papers you’ve read. It just makes the whole community more interesting.”