PhD student Francesco Pittaluga has received a Microsoft Dissertation Grant for his dissertation, “Privacy Preserving Computational Cameras.” Francesco is advised by Dr. Sanjeev Koppal, ECE Florida associate professor and principal investigator at the the Florida Optics and Computational Sensor (FOCUS) Lab.

Francesco’s research involves a novel approach to preserving privacy in a world where the widespread deployment of connected cameras is a given. As he says,

“I’m building novel computational cameras that perform privacy processing, at the camera level, via optical filtering of the incident light-field and/or sensor-level electronics, and developing a data-driven framework to learn privacy-preserving encoding functions through adversarial optimization.”

In other words, the images are processed in such a way that privacy is ensured prior to their being passed to the network. More information about the grant is available on the program website.

Prior to joining UF, Francesco attended Tufts University where he received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering with a second major in Computer Science