​Please join Charlottesville Data Science for the talk From Still Photos to 3D Scene: An Introduction to Neural Radiance Fields. Alison Lu, a data scientist at ENSCO Rail, will explore this breakthrough in computer vision and discuss its applications in industry settings. Prior to Alison's talk, Carson Sweet will provide a brief demo of Syncog, an experimental platform he's working on to explore how cognitive scaffolding can enhance the AI assistant experience.

​We'll be gathering in person at Vault Virginia on the evening of Tuesday, August 4. We look forward to seeing you there!

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​About Carson's demo

​Carson Sweet will provide a brief demo of Syncog, an experimental platform he's working on to explore how cognitive scaffolding can enhance the AI assistant experience through transparent continuity, deeper engagement with users and tasks, greater efficiency, and governed agency. Syncog's current cognitive architecture maintains durable state, develops a history-shaped worldview, and computes continuously updated, behavior-driving signals from identity, values, goals, drives, affect, and multi-layer memory. The research program seeks to measure how external cognitive scaffolding influences LLM inference and behavior—and whether those effects are reliable, durable, and beneficial.

​About Alison's talk

​What if you could create a 3D, 360-degree scene out of a couple dozen pictures? Traditional methods of doing so may need expensive equipment, hundreds of overlapping photos, and precise location data. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), first introduced in 2020, are a breakthrough in machine vision, allowing a trained network to create a photorealistic scene on relatively small amounts of data. There is a growing set of applications for NeRF, from digital VFX to medical imaging.

​In this talk, we will go into depth on what NeRF is and how it works, as well as a genealogy of improvements and related techniques from leaders in the field. There will be a demo on how to create scenes and a discussion on adaptations to the transportation industry.

​About the speaker

​Alison Lu is a data scientist working at ENSCO Rail, a company that provides integrated technology products for railroads. She has been a part of the Charlottesville Data Science Community since 2023.