From Still Photos to 3D Scene: An Introduction to Neural Radiance Fields
Join Charlottesville Data Science for our August event about modern computer vision
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.
We’ll be gathering in person at Vault Virginia on the evening of Tuesday, August 4. We look forward to seeing you there!
About the 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.
Results from last week’s community survey
Last week, we sent out a survey asking our community for their feedback about:
What types of events they’re most interested in attending, and
Which days and times work best for them.
Here are the results! n = 20, which is a solid response rate for a survey like this.
What types of Charlottesville Data Science events are you most interested in attending?
When are you most likely to attend?
The results indicate a clear preference for tech talk and show-and-tell events on weekday evenings, which is largely what we do now. This suggests either (1) we’re on the right track, and/or (2) a self-selection effect is at play, where the people who subscribe to the Charlottesville Data Science newsletter and respond to the survey are the ones who are most likely to be satisfied with the way we already do things, and people who would prefer something different aren’t represented in the sample.
In any case — thank you to those of you who responded! Maybe we’ll do more micro-surveys like this in the future to gather feedback from the community.
More upcoming events around Charlottesville
Tuesday, July 28: Cville AI Explorers hosts their July event at Studio IX. It’s a two-for-one talk night: first, Kyle Carmitchel (Freehold Software) walks through “Building a Second Brain,” the personal AI-agent architecture he built on the Claude Agent SDK to manage email, calendars, and family logistics over iMessage. Next, Justin Schroeder of Standard Agents makes the case for small, domain-specific agents over monolithic “Swiss Army knife” ones.
Friday, October 2 – Saturday, October 3: Save the date for beCamp 2026, one of the longest-running and most storied events in the Charlottesville technology scene. beCamp is the Charlottesville tech community’s annual “unconference”, an event fully planned and run by the people who show up. Registration will open in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!