Manu Gond from Kolkata new PhD‑student within Pleoptima

Tell me about your research topic?

My research project is titled “Augmented Telepresence for Interactive Remote Actions”. The topic is about developing the methodologies that can help in capturing a remote scene in its full immersive detail and displaying it in real time and viewpoint of scene can be changed so it can be looked from different angles. With use of this, we can eliminate the need to having a human working in a dangerous or not easily accessible environments, as worker will be able to just use this telepresence system to remotely operate the machine, and the system will display the whole scene in full immersion with additional details related to scene by help of augmented reality. The augmented telepresence system is different from your standard video feed, as here one can navigate the scene like we do in real life. For a reference point, you can take VR videogames as an example, but instead of synthetic scene, we have to display real remote scene.

I will be investigating the ways to capture the remote scene, combining data from multiple cameras, transmit data under limited bandwidth and displaying it in real time. Currently light field cameras can capture scene in detail but transmission of this huge amount of data is not possible, for this I will be looking into deep learning methods as recently they have been used to reconstruct a whole scene with limited or missing data (for example light field reconstruction from just a single image).

Tell me a little about your background?

I’m from Kolkata, India, which is north eastern part of India. I have completed my Bachelor’s and Master’s in Computer Science from University of Calcutta. My master’s thesis was on hybrid recommendation system which used deep learning based models for identifying trends and their overall sentiment from social media for recommendation results which was movies in our test case. After master’s, I worked as a research engineer at ‘Must B2B Matchmaking & Virtual Exhibitions platform’ on both research and back-end development. In addition to these, I have been a part of Facebook AI and Intel Edge AI scholarship programs which focused on using deep learning and optimizing deep learning models on edge devices for computer vision applications.

Why did you apply for this position?

During my scholarship program with Facebook AI and Intel Edge AI, I had developed interested in computer vision, edge devices and deep learning. I wanted to find out other applications which can benefit from the research in this area. When looking for available PhD positions, the Plenoptima and more specifically ESR 11 project really stood out to me, as it involved much more practical use case, and involved investigating method which needs to work in real time. I also looked at the publications from realistic 3D group to get more context, more specifically papers done by Elijs Dima & Waqas Ahmad and found their work really interesting. Additionally, Plenoptima network itself is really great opportunity to any ESR as it is designed in such a way that you develop your experience working and communicating with other ESRs from the network who are from different backgrounds working on different problems. Hence, I applied and after completing few interviews and assignments I got selected for ESR 11 position.

What have you done so far as an PhD-student?

For my research project, I have done literature review for my first paper and have identified some interesting work in light field reconstruction. I have selected few state-of-the-art methods that I am using as the departure point for my research work.

Apart from the research, I have presented overview of my ESR 11 project in plenoptima webinar and also have participated as an opponent in other ESR’s presentation. I also went to Finland last month to attend the Plenoptima training school where I learned about theory of plenoptics which will be useful in the research. Currently I am working on a project related to machine learning course which I am taking this semester.

Is this your first time in Sweden? How do you like it?

Yes, this is my first time here, I arrived on 28th December, and started at Mid Sweden University from first week of January. Experiencing different place, weather and culture here in Sweden, it has been great. Everyone I talk to is willing to help and there is no language barrier as everyone speaks fluent English here. I also like the public transportation system, everything that I needed during my first week was easily accessible with public transport, which made life much easier. The landscape here makes it perfect for hiking. For first time I experienced snowfall and temperatures below 0 degrees and it was fun. I was also lucky enough to see the northern lights few times. I have also visited Norra & Södra Berget with my friends at night when we went up there to see northern lights. I am looking forward to see what the summer is like here in Sweden.

What do you do in your spare time?

I watch movies, play games, hike in my spare time.