Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain
engineering.princeton.edu
engineering.princeton.edu
How much bigger, does anyone know or can estimate?
Am I correct in saying this is still a Metalens but getting Neural / ML enhanced?
I can't tell you how many papers/patents I wrote only to be listed as the 5th contributor or some such thing.
My guess is each postdoc could produce 1 to 2 papers a year on there own. A PhD student at such a difficult school can probably produce one paper a year once they are in there third year.
14 publications in 2021. Let's guess 6 of which are from postdocs, we'll say 4 of which are from PhD students, leaving us with 4 publications between both professors, or two from each. Of course, this is all very rough estimation.
This model leads to a necessary accrual of credit to more senior researchers because the default assumption is to assume credit of a group to the more senior individual.
The problem is there's no way (or less way) for the less senior individual to establish credit unless they are publishing on their own, which isn't feasible.
In this way, group efforts tend to trickle toward the person in the senior position, and credit accrues to people in management of large groups irrespective of where ideas are coming from or who is doing the work. We say "someone is a great scientist" because they have an administrative position with reference to a large group.
Whoever has the most papers with the largest groups wins.
Don’t mean to pick on you personally, but as the top voted comment it feels like we’re rewarding this harmful perspective on academia. I’d like to say “academia needs to mature” but the problem is actually that it’s gone backwards, and undoing that invasion of management consultant culture and subsequent game playing into a somewhat altruistic and intellectual vocation seems like a very hard problem.
It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken.
I see your point though. This is a recurrent discussion.
I think the change of paradigm was positive. Nowadays, papers are published in interactive and incremental way, instead of, doing a parallel with software engineering, with the waterfall methodology.
Publising the research incrementally allows more people to get involved, create more branches, and spot errors earlier.
In sofware developement, the change of the process lead to huge advanvements. I believe this is also true for academia.
I agree with this statement: the system is completely broken.
I've peered inside top level conferences and I can tell you that publishing there does not mean you are pushing the state of the art. Instead you may be: popular, good at playing the political game, lucky (when acceptance rates are low, luck plays a huge part - and why they are low is a story in itself), good at writing marketing copy rather than doing science, engaging in corruption to get your paper accepted, or playing to the gallery in a way that might even harm science.
More widely, if your field is 99% politicians and 1% scientists, then the _scientific_ barrier to entry at an elite conference is not going to be a good endorsement of your work.
For instance, last year there was a whole debacle at one of those top conferences because someone from nvidia, that was in the board of this conference, made (and posted on twitter!) a black list for people who said something that was not alligned with hers ideology. (I wonder what happened after the whole thing went quiet).
Yet, I do still think those conference, and their sponsors, have interest in only selecting the papers based on their content. I don't think you can get them to publish your papers so many time only with influence. Also, things like blind peer review exists to mitigate that (although, it favors writing quality over content).
Also. Politics isn't intrinsically evil. One of the great success of Einstein was spreading his idea. Argbly, others made more important achievement, yet didn't amass the same level of fame as him.
In my experience, people who are good at politics, usually persue others path. Doing so only to get publication is not the most rewarding thing for those kinda of people.
By your own analogy, it would be like saying "someone is a great computer scientist" based on the number of commits they or their colleagues make.
I might even argue that regardless of how the product is or is not improved by the process, the way we attribute credit is worse.
If you move to a collaborative incremental process but still talk in terms of specific individuals as the source, rather than a group, there's a problem.
I'm sorry to inform you that this is untrue. Elite conferences are full of work that is _scientifically_ awful and does not contribute anything to _science_.
Case in point:
https://icfp21.sigplan.org/track/icfp-2021-papers#event-over...
the key is that "elite" in science means "small", amongst other things. Any conference that accepts so many papers that not very attendant can visit every presentation is already not "elite" anymore.
But even within that conference, there are examples of exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not going to personally criticise individuals as it's a widespread and often systemic problem. Peter Thiel has summarised this better than I ever could.
Full meaning significantly most of the work is of no value?
License, registration, and proof of your statement please.
"One day, your child will be able to go to a dollar store and buy sheet of sticker cameras. These cameras will be paper thin, can be stuck anywhere and will have their own internet address that can be accessed over the public internet from a browser. Everything I just described is technically possible now, it's just not been put together and some of the components aren't cheap enough. As a society, we should be prepared for the ramifications of this."
Research and advancements like this make the above feel like it's getting closer and closer to the above.
The thing under the golden metal contact plate has a diameter of about 5 millimeters, yet it is able to perform a subset of something like Java.
The same goes for the SIM in your phone, or a Micro-SD Card.
There the Microcontroller serves the interface on one end, and acts as a RAID-controller for the arrays of NAND-storage on the other end.
This can all be hidden behind that, layered underneath each other.
The biggest thing would be battery to power it, or the coils to harvest energy from WIFI, or whatever.
Combine that with circuitry which only wakes up the system when the image is changing, and your're good to go, ...err spy ;->
OTOH the light sensor needs not be as small. Imagine a thin optical fiber with such a lens on one end, and a large lens and large enough camera on the other end. In could immediately make a better and less invasive endoscope, e.g. for surgery.
Not necessarily. I recently looked into miniature cameras for self- built drones.
For less than $50, you can get a package with a lens that's maybe 2-3mm across. The entire sensor+lens unit is roughly 1cm cubed. But then you need the electronics to process and store the image, and you're up to credit card size. And then you need a battery, and not a tiny one because that image processing draws quite a bit of juice.
So basically, yep, this work is just about a better tiny lens; the press article is misleading (the paper [1] is better written). I don't know enough about optics to comment on how it compares to previous work, or how small a full lens + sensor system can currently be.
My impression is that their metasurface lens has approximately a 1 mm focal-length. In the diagram, the light appears to pass through an intermediate focus at that distance, which they then pick up with another optical system for control/convenience.
I don't see anything that would, in principle, prevent using the metasurface lens as a component of a tiny camera. Nature has certainly evolved imaging systems that are smaller and modern sensor technology permits wavelength-scale pixels. With maximum charity, it appears that this lens/methodology might be used to yield a ~1-2 Mpx imaging system with a 1 mm f/2 optical system.
The claimed advance here appears to be that the combination of their lens and processing yields higher quality imaging at these physical scales than prior work.
It does indeed appear that in combination with a tiny imaging sensor, this lens could yield a camera the size of a large salt-grain.
This entire field of engineering appears to be in a golden decade; it may not be too long before we start seeing metasurface optics in consumer imaging products.
If we had a full body suit made of tiny cameras behind translucent LEDs, could we have invisibility/cloaking suits? Is this remotely feasible with current technology? Serious question.
E.g. a stealth aircraft can absorb the radar signal, analyze its direction (using a phased antenna array) and send back a "reflection from earth" with a proper delay. This renders the aircraft effectively invisible to the radar, provided that the covering of the aircraft indeed does not reflect much back.
Privacy will have to be redefined. We've done this lots of times. You hear what goes on behind the bathroom door, you don't say anything, you actually forget it. Because it's not polite to snoop.
So in future even if you see something you shouldn't on camera, it'd be boorish to mention it.
That doesn't solve the police state of course.
Doesn't it still need a source of power?
https://phys.org/news/2017-08-ambient-energy-power-internet....
Or combine it with photovoltaics:
https://www.smart2zero.com/news/self-powered-camera-sensor-c...
AFAIK RFID can only store and send data, and are pretty "dumb".
https://hackaday.com/2015/12/08/theremins-bug/
https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2021/02/07/the-great-seal...
Beep! Beep! Beep!
This was the end of a science fiction novel from 1972, albeit the technology was an imaginary substance called "slow glass":
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/939190.Other_Days_Other_...
he worked on and made quite a bit on the patent for the first ingestible pill camera, and had some even smaller cameras for other medical devices that were even smaller (and fun to play with when I've visited a few years back)
I also bet many of these lenses can be stacked together to create a nice lightfield display...
Presumably in the "how large do you want the salt grain to be?" sense?
Did I understand that right?
> Enabled by a joint design of the camera’s hardware and computational processing, the system could enable minimally invasive endoscopy with medical robots to diagnose and treat diseases, and improve imaging for other robots with size and weight constraints. Arrays of thousands of such cameras could be used for full-scene sensing, turning surfaces into cameras.
There are existing swallowable capsule endoscopy devices like the PillCam[1], the entirety of which is 11mm x 26mm[2]
[1] https://www.medtronic.com/covidien/en-us/products/capsule-en...
[2] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/johns_hopkins_bayview/_docs/...
Afaik, GIs much rather prefer to use the scope, and would only use pillcam if everything but the small intestine hasn't been ruled out.
The scariest is sophisticated, well-informed and higly intelligent HN commenters in this thread who seem to be bubbling over with unbridled enthusiasm.
It'll only keep shrinking, until it is the size of dust particles, just another order of magnitude.
How do you prevent dust-cameras from being around? a pre-emptive EMP pulse lol?
1- Actually, the main problem with privacy is that most people still doesnt really care and many more underestimates its current reach, if this were somehow to happen, proably it would raise awareness and that is of topmost priority. 2- Its is already mindboggling. 3- A spy needs privacy to spy.