The past, present and future of entertainment

Leonard Bergstein’s career had an early and fast start. His PhD dissertation dealing with the General Theory of Optically Compensated Varifocal Systems (JOSA, 1958), later named “Zoom Lenses” was extraordinary.  It revolutionized photography and film recordings, and is now standard in most camera systems worldwide.  

Bergstein's approach to the design of such systems, done with the help of mathematical tools, (i.e. Chebycheff polynomials), provided an elegant and useful solution to an intractable problem at the time.  Bergstein is likely best known and most recognized for inventing, designing, and developing Zoom Lens system technology. 

Bergstein, who became a professor at Brooklyn Poly in 1960, patented several different variations on it. This single invention has revolutionized photography and film forever – zoom lenses are now standard on almost every camera made worldwide. In addition to this world changing technology, he also trained dozens of grateful and accomplished students over 40 years of teaching, research, and consulting in electrical engineering, electromagnetic theory, electrophysics, lasers, physics, optical communications and statistical optics.  Many view him as one of the post-World War II founding fathers who integrated and applied the above-mentioned fields of science and technology. 

In 1957, Gordon Gould was working toward a PhD in Physics at Columbia University, where Physics research was booming. Among others, Charles Townes, the inventor of the maser, was teaching there. Gould, whose former specialty was classical optics, was doing research in microwave spectroscopy. One Saturday night, Gould was inspired "in a flash" with a revolutionary idea: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, or the "laser."

A light-wave amplifier would be much more powerful than a maser (which amplifies microwaves), since every photon of light has a hundred thousand times more energy than a photon of microwave energy. By the end of that weekend, Gould had designed a device that he predicted could heat a substance to the temperature of the sun in a millionth of a second.

Fearing competition, Gould abandoned his doctorate in order to focus on bringing his invention into production quickly. He spent 1958 refining and improving his model, but he did not file for a patent until 1959, believing that he had to build a prototype before filing. Unfortunately, this resulted in a 20-year legal battle, which Gould finally won in 1977, when the first of his laser patents was issued.

By then, Gould's laser technology was already being used in countless practical applications, including welding, scanning, and surgery. But if you’ve listened to a CD or watched a DVD, you can thank Gould, whose technology was key to new high-definition recording mediums.

Jerome H. Lemelson was one of the most prolific American inventors of all time. His inventions, for which he amassed more than 500 patents, include essential parts of dozens of products in common use today, including the VCR, camcorder, Walkman®, cordless phone, fax machine, data and word processing systems, and industrial robots.

Born in 1923, Jerome Lemelson was already inventing as a child. One early effort was a lighted tongue depressor, which he invented for his father, a physician. Later, youthful experiments with model airplanes evolved into a more serious role as a designer of defense systems for the U.S. during World War II, and three degrees in engineering from New York University (‘47, ‘49, and ‘51).

Soon thereafter, Lemelson began his over 40-year career as an independent inventor. Like many inventors, he first focused on toys and novelties, but the nascent computer age inspired him with more serious ideas. From 1954 to 1956, Lemelson applied for his first automation patents, including his "machine vision" system. This combination of computers, robotics, and electro-optics allows assembly-line robots to assess an item and determine what work needs to be done to it, adjust themselves to perform multiple operations on the item, and even do quality control of the work when it is done.

In the 1960s, Lemelson began to land licensing offers for his industrial ideas, including an automated warehouse system. In 1974, he licensed the audio cassette drive mechanism that made the Walkman® possible to Sony. In 1977, ironically, his first patent application for the camcorder was rejected — the examiner considered portable video recorders an impossibility.

In a fusion of technology and dance, a project led by Professor Yong Liu with colleagues Professor Yao Wang and Co-Chair of the Department of Technology Culture and Society and Director of Integrated Design & Media R. Luke DuBois, is reimagining dance education through Point-Cloud Video (PCV) technology.

Collaborating with Mark Morris Dance Group and NYU Tisch’s Dance Department, the team is creating immersive 3D dance content at NYU Tandon @ the Yard. The project introduces innovative compression and streaming techniques that will allow high-quality 3D video to be transmitted over standard internet connections, making it possible for students to view and interact with dance performances from multiple angles on everyday devices.

Currently, streaming PCVs requires bandwidth and computational power that exceeds what is generally available, limiting its real-world applications. The NYU Tandon team’s project will address those obstacles, reducing bandwidth consumption and delivery latency, and increasing power consumption efficiency so that PCVs can be streamed far more easily. 

This technology could transform performing-arts education, making high-quality instruction accessible to students regardless of their geographic location, and providing a potent case study for the power of PCV.

If one were to draw a Venn diagram with a domain for games and a domain for computer science/ artificial intelligence (AI), the overlap would be huge. The Game Innovation Lab at NYU Tandon is mining that fertile ground by exploring the symbiotic relationship between video and digital games and AI. The implications go far beyond avatars and joysticks: the work done at the Lab could lead to profound innovations in automated systems able to run processes for everything from building HVAC systems to global shipping.

The Lab, under the leadership of Julian Togelius — professor of computer science and engineering and one of the founders of the Copenhagen-based AI startup Modl.ai — is a hotbed of research into how games can help deep neural networks learn and how AI can help game developers automate expensive and time-consuming aspects of game development — and make new types of games possible.

Since the beginning of computing, games have been both a training ground and a benchmark for its capabilities. Now, with AI systems like AlphaGo and DeepBlue beating the daylights out of human players, it may seem as if AI and games have gone about as far as they can go in their dance of mutual benefit.

Not so, asserts Togelius, who was honored with an IEEE 2020 Outstanding Early Career Award for his contributions to the field of computational intelligence and games. He explains that while deep learning systems can become nearly perfect at playing one game, few can generalize — applying to other contexts what they have “memorized” about a certain game. In other words, AlphaGo can’t play checkers (at least not without extensive re-engineering).

“The key is using reinforcement learning to teach AI to learn what might be called general game abilities,” says Togelius. “We have been able to improve their ability to do so by adding procedural algorithms, those that generate game levels so as to force the reinforcement learning algorithms to play more generally.”

The researchers’ work on how to use automatic generation of gameplay and levels to create more general game playing has put the Lab at the vortex of a virtuous cycle: smarter, more flexible machine learning systems that can play games can also help design them level by level, as well as personalize the playing experience for each player in real-time and automatically generate tutorial content.