Ali Rahimi

PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Research interests

Motion.

Advisor: Sandy Pentland

Education

M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences
MIT, 2001

B.S. in EECS
UC Berkeley, 1997

Experience

Powder Monkey,

Belmont, CA

Member Research Staff
Interval Research Corporation,

Palo Alto, CA

Vision Software Engineer
Electric Planet (Interactive),

Palo Alto, CA

Electric Planet is no longer hiring vision engineers.

Research Direction

Compared to primates and most large animals, insects have a very small number of photoreceptive sites suitable for vision. And yet, they can perform many of the same tasks we perform: they navigate, find food, mate, and avoid danger. The question I am trying to answer is: "What interesting things can we do with very sparsely sampled imagery of the 3D world?"

My project is called Bug Vision, which I place under the discipline of "very low resolution imaging." I'm interested, among other things, in computing high resolution images from very low resolution images, robot navigation using low resolution sensors, and classification of data from low resolution sensors.

Here is my thesis proposal.

Publications

Birthplace

Brussells, Belgium

A Favorite Book

Du Contrat Social, J-J. Rousseau

Most wishes to have dinner with

Immanual Kant, or Martha Stewart. I can't decide.

Most wishes to hurt

David Hume, or Voltaire. I can't decide. I'd like to give both of them a beating.

Personal Web Page

Vismod Home Page