One can gain a great deal of physical and chemical insight from images and likewise one can apply mathematical and physical intuition towards the design of better imaging systems. In the first part of my talk I will discuss our lab's research focus on imaging, manipulation, and spectroscopy at the nanoscale.  We employ scanning tunneling microscopy to investigate the electronic and chemical properties of a wide-range of materials including graphene, organic semiconductors, and macroscale-inspired molecular machines. The latter two thirds of my talk will focus on the new field of compressive imaging, spotlighting its implementation in infrared, hyperspectral, and a sum-frequency generation microscope system. The basis of these systems is that one can exploit sparsity when acquiring signals and that one can condense the information during acquisition using far fewer samples than previously believed. The last part of this talk will highlight how we address the challenges of acquiring video in such imaging systems given that a large focal plane array is replaced by many measurements in time with a single detector.

Bio: Kevin Kelly is an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University.  He received a B.S. in engineering physics from Colorado School of Mines and a Ph.D. in applied physics from Rice University.  He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Materials Research in Sendai and in the chemistry department at Penn State University. In addition to being a fellow of the Rice Quantum Institute, he is an active member of the Penn State Center for Nanoscale Science, the Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health and the Environment Center at Princeton University and the fledgling Center for Imaging Research at UCLA, an instructor in the History department at Rice, and co-founder of Inview Technology Corporation.