 Nearly 20 years ago, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UWI St. Augustine, struck up an informal collaboration with Dr. Anil Kokaram, who was then a Senior Lecturer and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. The initial project was to establish a research collaboration on Video Retrieval for Distance Education and Broadcast, which took off in 2001.
Since then there have been a number of exchanges between the groups.
It was natural then for DECE’s Dr. Akash Pooransingh, who did his PhD under the supervision of Professor Kokaram and Dr. Cathy-Ann Radix, to circulate a notice that Professor Kokaram would be delivering the Rudranath Capildeo Lecture at the Central Bank Auditorium on July 7. His topic was “Understanding the Technology of Digital Video and its Impact on Everyday Life.”
“In his talk he shall make mention of some applications that may be of benefit to the country and region,” wrote Dr. Pooransingh.
Looking at the online links to Professor Kokaram, I realized he was the person who had won an Oscar ten years ago. He was only 39 and not yet a professor when he jointly won the Scientific and Engineering award from Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for work on the design and development of Furnace, an integrated suite of software plug-ins used to enhance visual effects in movie sequences. Apparently, these are now widely used in the industry for motion-based effects and quality improvement (The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, King Kong, etc.).
He was obviously very interested in cricket, and was working on cricket-related software, so although I knew we would not be able to have coverage of the lecture in this issue of the paper for deadline reasons, I sent him a few questions out of curiosity about this Sangre Grande boy who had become a rock star.
VB: Digital Image Sequence Processing, Motion Estimation, Content Based Image Retrieval and Motion Picture Restoration are some of the areas of your expertise. Apart from the engineering science it involves, it speaks to a particular interest in film and movies. Was it a passion for cinema that drew you into this field? How did you get to this specialty?
AK: Well spotted. These areas are linked by the study of information extraction from signals or Digital Signal Processing. I got inspired to get into that area when I sat in an undergraduate class in second year in Cambridge and the guest speaker spoke about restoring old gramophone recordings using DSP. Combined with my habit of going to the cinema any chance I got growing up and in University ... when I was offered a sponsored studentship to develop similar techniques for restoring old movies, I jumped at the chance.
VB: Some of the online articles on your career mention an interest also in cricket-related technology, what has been the nature of your work in this area?
AK: I started this back around 2002. I wanted to generate automated summaries of cricket matches from recorded broadcasts. So I had a couple of postdocs and PhD students work on extracting motion information from the broadcasts that let us figure out how to spot when the bowler was running up and which side of the wicket the ball was hit on. Then I started getting interested in making it easier to use video in cricket coaching sessions. So we developed some techniques using motion again to spot each bowler/batsman action in a net so the coach could review it automatically without having to rewind manually ... I called it "Last Action Replay." The reason for all of this interest is because my family all follow cricket and I was running the staff team at Trinity for some time. So it made sense to combine work with more personal interests. I was not that keen on using video for biomechanics analysis of cricketers because I figured that there was enough work about that going on. What was missing and what is still missing is a way to make it easy to use video for the non-expert during a net session.
VB: How did winning an Academy Award for Science and Technology in 2006 change your life?
AK: I guess people take me more seriously now. It was a fantastic experience and on the back of that I have been able to meet with many very accomplished technologists in cinema and video technology.
Google became interested in my small company on the back of that award and eventually acquired it in 2011. That changed my life a huge amount: giving me a much wider vision about video technology and its impact on people.
VB: The subject you chose for the Rudranath Capildeo Lecture was Understanding the Technology of Digital Video and Its Impact on Everyday Life, can you share some elements of that talk?
AK: It’s about how movies are made, how they are distributed and how information can be extracted from video. I mention how Capildeo's work is part of a huge body of literature which informed the creation of the spectacular special effects in the movie "Interstellar." I'll show a bit about how movie production now uses both 3D and 2D ideas to make productions and how that same information can lead to the ability to extract information from video ... e.g. cricket.
VB: Your parents are both well-known educators in Trinidad, how would you describe your childhood years in such an environment?
AK: I guess I was always focussed on school and academics. It seemed natural to me to consider a career in research as a thing to do. It was great fun looking back on it. I made many good friends at Hillview College and I am in touch with a couple even today.
VB: You are still very young, on the cusp of fifty, what next for you? If you could freely choose your ideal lifestyle, what would it entail?
AK: Tough question. I am just figuring that out now. I'll let you know when I get to 51.
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