Plenary Speakers
18 - 21 August 2025
Hyatt Regency Seattle
Seattle, Washington USA
Grace Kuo
Reality Labs Research at Meta, USA
Holographic Displays: Past, Present and Future
Holograms have captured the public imagination since their first media representation in Star Wars in 1977. Although fiction, the idea of glowing, 3D projections is based on real-world holographic display technology, which can create 3D image content by manipulating the wave properties of light. However, in practice, the image quality of experimental holograms has significantly lagged traditional displays until recently. What changed? This talk will delve into how hardware improvements met ideas from machine learning to spark a new wave of research in holographic displays. We’ll take a critical look at what this research has achieved, discuss open problems and explore the potential of holographic technology to create head-mounted displays with a glasses-form factor.
About the Speaker
Grace Kuo is a research scientist in the Display Systems Research team at Meta where she works on novel display and imaging technology for virtual and augmented reality. She is particularly interested in the joint design of hardware and algorithms for imaging systems, and her work spans optics, optimization, signal processing and machine learning. Grace’s recent work on “Flamera,” a light-field camera for virtual reality passthrough, won Best-in-Show at the SIGGRAPH Emerging Technology showcase and received wide-spread positive press coverage from venues like Forbes and UploadVR. Grace earned her BS at Washington University in St. Louis and her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, advised by Dr. Laura Waller and Dr. Ren Ng.
Pietro Ferraro
Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems "Eduardo Caianiello" (ISASI-CNR), Italy
Beyond Labels: Enhanced 3D Live Cell Imaging Combined with Flow Cytometry
This presentation explores cutting-edge advancements in label-free 3D live cell imaging, integrating high-throughput flow cytometry with tomographic microscopy. We demonstrate how this combined approach overcomes limitations of traditional 2D and fluorescence-based methods, enabling detailed visualization of cellular architecture and dynamics without the perturbations of labeling. This label-free technique opens new avenues for studying cell cycle progression, cell-drug interactions and other dynamic biological processes, offering valuable insights into cellular function and behavior.
About the Speaker
Pietro Ferraro is Director of Research at the CNR Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems (ISASI), Italy. He served as ISASI Director from 2014 to 2019 and President of CNR Research Area in Pozzuoli from 2012 to 2019. Ferraro has held leadership roles in various organizations and worked as Principal Investigator with Alenia Aeronautics from 1988 to 1993. His research spans holography, microscopy, micro-nanostructures, non-destructive testing and optical sensors, with over 350 journal papers, 20,000 citations and 14 patents. A Fellow of both Optica and SPIE, he received the SPIE Gabor Award and served on the Scientific and Technical Committee for the Italian Space Agency from 2018 to 2023.
