Sunday, January 31, 2010

Going Hollywood with Compressive Sensing

As some of you know, Justin Romberg has been an advisor to the Numb3rs television series. Well it looks like the screenwriters of the new Battlestar Galactica TV series could have used a scientific advisor of that caliber (by the way, I did not mean to say that screenwriters for Numb3rs actually used all of Justin's inputs). Chris Bilder points out how performing Group Testing to detect Cylons could have helped the script and change the storyboard (I mentioned this study before). First, let us give some context about what the Cylons are:


Then let us introduce Chris Bilder's presentation (first 10 minutes of the presentation) on the subject:



Chris Bilder's page on his Chance paper is here. The full video of the talk is here. Let us recall that group testing is connected to compressive sensing in that it solves the same problem, finding a sparse element in a large batch of elements with the fewest number of tests (measurements). As it turns out, my webcrawler found Mark Iwen's latest presentation on the subject entitled Interpolation with Sparsity Assumptions: From Syphilis Testing to Sparse Fourier Transforms.

But coming back to the title of this entry, wouldn't it be neat if one could use a random lens imager in one of those CSI plots ?

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