David Degner

Boston Photographer and Photojournalist

Video Projects

I started working on video projects when I kept hitting the limits of photography.  Since then I have been creating more videos for myself and select clients.  I usually work as a one-man-band shooting, directing, audio, and editing all myself.  But I have also worked as a single part of a larger crew.

The one-man-band approach fits my photography background allowing me to slip in and out of situations without the disruption of a crew and extended setups.

Robots learn to use their hands

Self-Supervised Correspondence in Visuomotor Policy Learning

A video of the latest research by Peter Florence, Lucas Manuelli, Russ Tedrake of MIT’s CSAIL lab. It was republished by MIT.

Having robots learn dexterous tasks requiring real-time hand-eye coordination is hard. Many tasks that we would consider simple, like hanging up a baseball cap on a rack, would be very challenging for most robot software. What’s more, for a robot to learn each new task, it typically takes significant amounts of engineering time to program the robot. Pete Florence and Lucas Manuelli in the Robot Locomotion Group took a step closer to that goal with their work. Their paper will be presented at International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in May in Paris.

Link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06933

Behind the scenes of a contact tracing study

Proximity Pilot, A Contact Tracing App

A video produced for Julie Shah’s team and their study of a contact tracing app, Proximity Pilot. It is long and descriptive because it was designed for the longform TEDxMIT.

This talk describes the launch of a study on the effectiveness of digital contact tracing and aims to mature new privacy-preserving technologies. This research is a collaborative project initiated by students, involving four research labs at MIT, MIT Medical and MIT Lincoln Lab. The MIT Proximity Pilot Study, soon to be launched, is approved by MIT‘s Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES) and participation in the study is voluntary.