Imaging heavy hitters join Adobe

A number of rock stars from the world of image science have recently joined Adobe:

That crazy-cool image resizing demo I mentioned last week continues to get all kinds of attention. I was therefore happy to learn that co-creator Shai Avidan joined the Adobe office in Newton, MA (just down the ‘pike from MIT) last Monday. Here’s a bit more info and Shai’s photo.
Wojciech Matusik began work at Adobe in May. He’s done some really cool work in the emerging fields of multi-aperture photography, 3D TV, and much more. Like Shai, he works from the Newton office.
Sylvain Paris is due to join Adobe in a couple of weeks. He’s worked on techniques for matching tones across photos ("Make my image pop like Ansel’s"), generating 3D data from 2D captures, and more. His paper on bilateral filtering was written with MIT colleagues Jiawen Chen (who interned this summer at Adobe) and Fredo Durand.

Adobe Senior Principal Scientist David Salesin, who manages this crew, notes that "If you count their SIGGRAPH papers as well, you’ll see that current Adobe employees had 11 of the 108 papers in the conference."

Now, let me inject a disclaimer: Just because a particular researcher has worked on a particular technology in his or her past life, it’s not possible to conclude that a specific feature will show up in a particular Adobe product. How’s that for non-commital? ;-) In any case, it’s just exciting that so many smart folks are joining the team (more brains to hijack!).

[Update: Cambridge, MA-based Xconomy provides additional context for this news.]

0 thoughts on “Imaging heavy hitters join Adobe”

Of course, it would be a shame to see all that talent go to waste! 😛
[Of all the things I worry about, that’s not one of ’em. 🙂 –J.]

hmm… one has to wonder if Adobe plans to push further into the forensics world. I would love to see Photoshop driving electron and optical microscopy applications. Lord knows those fields need a shot in the arm.

Re: Scott Valentine’s comment…. John, you see what I am talking about? There have been a couple of 800lb gorillas in the scientific imaging world that have prevented lots of innovation from happening in a number of areas over the last few years. Deconvolution? Please, that is so 1997…

Now I’m hoping you’re not about to hire this guy making Pixel image editor at http://www.kanzelsberger.com … that would be bad luck for us, Linux users having the only hope for real image editor 🙂

And yet, deconvolution still doesn’t have a good solution…
Mr. Jones — I hear ya. But since the Photoshop team doesn’t spend most of it’s time working with microscopes, they could use some external advice on what features are necessary to support folks that do.

I think Sylvain owes me a beer. I remember telling you guys to ‘buy these people’ when I first saw the tonemap papers! Wonderful, lets get that into CS4 please 🙂
[Heh–I’ll pass that along. –J.]

I saw that on TechCrunch frontpage. The image resizer looks really cool.

Photoshop big and difficult program, I am using small software for image resizing.

I think Adobe will offload most of the work to its Delhi backoffice…Adobe has to generate revenues for its stockholder, cool research is good, but if it does not enter the product line sooner than later, the whole group will face what most top corporate research lab faces..Till then, these guys can enjoy the honeymoon in Newton

Sweet… although it looks like this is old news (not for me lol).

I am using small software for image resizing. Good solution.

The image resizer is really cool.

I think that just because one person has had a famous project that people have talked about in the past doesn’t mean that this will be mirrored in their later work. Is it possible that they are trying to move in other directions?

I think they will offload all that they can. I mean there bottom line is to make money and if they can do that off loading, I am sure they will be more then willing.