Emerging Worlds

Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, Head of Camera Culture Group, 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 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) and new theoretical models to augment light fields (ALF) to represent wave phenomena.

Program Coordinator, Emerging Worlds and Camera Culture, MIT Media Lab

Maggie Church provides administrative support for Emerging Worlds and Camera Culture by coordinating schedules and travel itineraries for professors; preparing, processing, and monitoring all financial activities such as preparing budgets and monitoring and initiating, reimbursements, procurement, travel expense reconciliation for professors and research groups. She facilitates communication between students and professors, and triages inquiries for research groups and professors from colleagues, sponsors, collaborators, press, and visitors

Director of Partnerships and Programs, Emerging Worlds SIG, MIT Media Lab

Beth Zonis has over 25 years of experience in strategy, innovation, and communications. She has worked for several IT startups, IBM, and MIT. She founded and ran her own consulting firm, Eco Marketing. Prior to working with the Emerging Worlds team, she helped build the Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Skoltech in Moscow, and she led communications for the Office of Digital Learning at MIT. She is strengthening the Emerging Worlds platform in India, enabling innovation hubs in new regions, and engaging new members. Beth is a mentor with the Cleantech Open and a Board Member of ACTION, an association of cleantech incubators. Beth holds a B.A. from Wellesley College, cum laude, in Political Science and French, and an MBA from Boston University. She speaks French and Spanish.

Kumbhathon Innovator and MIT Sloan Fellow

Sunil is a founder of KHANDBAHALE.COM – the free multilingual dictionary and KHANDBAHALE.ORG – the lingual fraternity. His digital dictionaries count over 120 million users across 150 countries on computers, web, mobiles, tablets and sms. He is conferred with the honorary title of ”Dictionary Man” and ‘Wordsmith’. He has been felicitated by The President of India and awarded as a ”Youth Icon” by the Times Group. He has been invited to Google, Facebook, Intel, Nike, Nasdaq, eBay, PayPal, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, the White House, WTC, the Pentagon, the World Bank, and the United Nations as an INK fellow. He has started a ‘Language-Friendship’ mission to enable people with language tools. Sunil is also a founder and secretary of the Global Prosperity Foundation – an NGO focused on rural education and development.  Recently he developed the world’s first ever Marathi language SpellChecker software program. He is building multilingual real-time seamless translation platform.

Post Doc, Camera Culture, MIT Media Lab

Anshuman Das is a postdoctoral associate in the Camera Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design. Anshuman is interested in creating rapid diagnostics that are smart, predictive, and accessible and will improve the way diagnostics are carried out. Within the health diagnostics field he is exploring intersections with health diagnostics and optics, lasers, UV-VIS and Infrared spectroscopy. He is also interested in super-resolution optical imaging and soft matter based optical elements. He has developed smartphone based skin imaging, wide-angle endoscopy and smart otoscopes and is in the process of clinical testing. Before coming to MITAnshuman received his Ph.D. from JNCASR in India where he researched on light management, degradation, and electrode design in organic solar cells.

Research Assistant, Camera Culture, MIT Media Lab

Mrinal Mohit is a Research Assistant in the Camera Culture Group.  He excited about making the invisible, visible. Having just graduated and moved from India, he is keen on working on the next generation of imaging and health technologies, applying paradigms of computer vision and machine learning to these fields.

Research Assistant, Camera Culture, MIT Media Lab

Tristan Swedish joins us as a Research Assistant after being a part of the lab for the last year working on eye diagnostic projects. At the MIT Media Lab, Tristanis excited about building new interactive health care paradigms made possible at the intersection of device design and machine learning.