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Recent Young European Researcher Award in Computer Graphics.
The European Association of Computer Graphics, Eurographics, has just recognized Adrián Jarabo, researcher at the Engineering Research Institute of Aragon (I3A) and professor at the Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering at the EINA, with the Young European Researcher Award in Computer Graphics. Eurographics already awarded him the prize for the best doctoral thesis in 2017.
It is the prize of a career. And you are only 34 years old...
It is given to people who finished their thesis relatively recently and who have already carried out impactful work in the field. I finished it in 2015, with Diego Gutiérrez as director. I have been lucky that I have worked with very good, very smart people.
Namely…
Diego Gutiérrez, colleagues in the group such as Adolfo Muñoz, Julio Marco, Belén Masiá... Also, very capable outside collaborators, such as Andreas Velten.
How much talent is housed in the hallway of the Ada Byron building of the Higher Polytechnic Center!
At Ada Byron, at Torres Quevedo, in Sciences, in Medicine... In Zaragoza there are truly brilliant people.
In the year in which covid put humanity against the wall, scientists have not stopped.
I think I have contributed little in that matter... We computer scientists have been lucky because we have been able to continue working, since teleworking was almost part of daily life; but in other fields they have had to stop research. Despite all these difficulties, despite covid, research and science have not stopped. Quite precariously, it has continued.
The year 2020 means a before and after. Has Covid accelerated certain processes that will no longer be reversed?
I understand that it refers to online education, teleworking, telemedicine. We will see the evolution.
You have worked for the US Department of Defense…
They financed the project for us. They have tried to bring together the best research groups on the transient image. Instead of taking a regular photo, which takes about 30 frames per second, take about a billion frames per second.
Billion with a 'b'?
That's right, one billion 'b' frames per second. And use this information to in turn extract more information from the scene, the information that is hidden in the time domain of light transport when it travels. Because at that temporal resolution we can see the light spread throughout the world. The project sought to see more. For example, through corners. Being able to see spaces that are occluded, that are not directly in the line of sight.
How much does the human eye see?
Not too much. As incredibly sophisticated as it is, it is not the most sophisticated in nature.
Are there better eyes?
That of the eagle has much more resolution, and that of the mantis shrimp.
The mantis shrimp...?
It has a visual system that is capable of perceiving different properties of light that we cannot see, such as the polarization state of light. Bees also distinguish many more colors than we do. We only see fundamentally three colors, the classic RGB.
How many frames per second does the human eye see?
Between 24 and 100 frames per second. That is why the videos are at that temporal resolution, since we design things so that we can see them. In our project, we reached a trillion frames per second – ten billion times faster.
The numbers are dizzying…
They are data.
Besides providing revealing data, what else do you do?
Capture as much information as possible. We try to see objects that a conventional camera or human eye cannot see. This will help us have better sensors that will be crucial in the future in our security, in our lives.
