The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing Society has chosen alum Ayush Bhandari as a recipient of its 2020 Best PhD Dissertation Award.
Ayush, who is now on the Faculty of Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London, says, "It's a great honor to receive this award. My doctoral research was purely driven by curiosity at the intersection of my hobbies, namely, photography and designing mathematical algorithms. I am fortunate to have been advised by Ramesh Raskar and my thesis committee members, Laurent Demanet, Laurent Daudet, and Felix Krahmer. These inspiring individuals and my collaborators have instilled in me the courage to think originally and most importantly, beyond the realm of scientific silos. Original ideas, like expeditions, come with their own risks. In that sense, this recognition is an encouraging signpost for my scientific explorations with which I hope to contribute to the field and the society.”
This award recognizes the impact of PhD research on the scientific discipline and practice in the field of signal processing, as well as the quality, rigor, and novelty of the work. Ayush's dissertation, Sampling Time-resolved Phenomena, features applications including low-cost bio imaging, computational cameras that operate at speed of light, reflection-free imaging and Unlimited Sensing—a digital sensing method for high-dynamic-range data acquisition. The research has led to interdisciplinary publications in the areas of optics, computer vision, signal processing, and harmonic analysis. His co-inventions have resulted in more than 10 patents in the United States, and his work on the emerging field of computational imaging will be included in an upcoming textbook to be published by MIT Press.
Ramesh Raskar says, “Ayush Bhandari beautifully merged the theoretical and practical aspects of imaging and inverse problems. His research in Time-resolved Imaging and Unlimited Sensing are likely to become fundamental building blocks of new forms of computational sensing and imaging.”
The award will be formally recognised at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Toronto, Canada.