The Digital Insider | Year: 2024

Atomos Shogun Ultra for Worship Video – Videoguys

In this article from Atomos, Austin Allen, the lead filmmaker at Times Square Church in New York City, shares how the Atomos Shogun Ultra monitor has transformed the church’s video production workflow. Located in the heart of Manhattan, Times Square Church serves over 50,000 attendees annually, and is known for pushing the boundaries of filmmaking and video ministry. Allen, a long-time user of Atomos products, highlights the Shogun Ultra’s ease of use and versatility, making it a perfect solution for churches and organizations looking to improve their video production processes. Whether used for live broadcasts, studio shoots, or smaller projects, Allen emphasizes how the Shogun Ultra has made a significant difference in their workflow, especially when working with diverse production needs.

One of the standout features Allen discusses is the Camera to Cloud functionality integrated into the Shogun Ultra. This feature enables filmmakers to upload high-quality H.265 files directly to the cloud while shooting, which is particularly beneficial for remote editing and post-production workflows. For churches, this offers a tremendous advantage, as editors or social media teams working off-site can access footage immediately without the need for manual file transfers. Allen explains how this feature streamlines video production, making it faster and more efficient, especially for time-sensitive content like church services, conferences, or social media updates. This cloud-based workflow also adds redundancy, ensuring that teams always have a backup while allowing them to work on footage in real time.

Another key feature Allen praises is the Shogun Ultra’s ability to record in 6K ProRes RAW. This capability provides high-quality recording even when using smaller camera setups, which is ideal for churches or filmmakers who want top-tier production quality without needing large-scale equipment. Allen explains how the Shogun Ultra allows users to unlock the full potential of their cameras, whether they are using a RED, ARRI, or a smaller DSLR like the Canon R5. Additionally, the ability to record in ProRes RAW is crucial for color matching across multiple cameras, a common challenge in productions that involve different types of cameras. With the Shogun Ultra, churches and filmmakers can ensure consistent image quality and color matching, even when using a mix of larger and smaller cameras in the same project.

Allen highlights the Shogun Ultra as an essential tool for his team at Times Square Church. Its user-friendly design and advanced features, such as ProRes RAW recording and Camera to Cloud integration, make it a perfect fit for churches and organizations with high production needs but limited resources. By offering flexible recording options and seamless cloud integration, the Shogun Ultra helps simplify complex production tasks and accelerates post-production timelines. Whether it’s used for live church broadcasts, conferences, or social media content creation, Allen emphasizes how the Shogun Ultra has proven itself as an invaluable asset in their workflow, allowing them to push the boundaries of their video production efforts.

In conclusion, this article showcases how the Atomos Shogun Ultra monitor has revolutionized the video production workflow at Times Square Church. Its versatility across different camera setups, from high-end cinema cameras to smaller DSLRs, and its advanced features like Camera to Cloud and 6K ProRes RAW recording make it an indispensable tool for filmmakers and video teams. By simplifying video production processes and offering high-quality output, the Shogun Ultra is an excellent choice for churches, ministries, and organizations looking to elevate their video content creation.

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Read the full article from Atomos HERE

Beyond Chain-of-Thought: How Thought Preference Optimization is Advancing LLMs

A groundbreaking new technique, developed by a team of researchers from Meta, UC Berkeley, and NYU, promises to enhance how AI systems approach general tasks. Known as “Thought Preference Optimization” (TPO), this method aims to make large language models (LLMs) more thoughtful and deliberate in their…

An exotic materials researcher with the soul of an explorer

Riccardo Comin says the best part of his job as a physics professor and exotic materials researcher is when his students come into his office to tell him they have new, interesting data.

“It’s that moment of discovery, that moment of awe, of revelation of something that’s outside of anything you know,” says Comin, the Class of 1947 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics. “That’s what makes it all worthwhile.”

Intriguing data energizes Comin because it can potentially grant access to an unexplored world. His team has discovered materials with quantum and other exotic properties, which could find a range of applications, such as handling the world’s exploding quantities of data, more precise medical imaging, and vastly increased energy efficiency — to name just a few. For Comin, who has always been somewhat of an explorer, new discoveries satisfy a kind of intellectual wanderlust.

As a small child growing up in the city of Udine in northeast Italy, Comin loved geography and maps, even drawing his own of imaginary cities and countries. He traveled literally, too, touring Europe with his parents; his father was offered free train travel as a project manager on large projects for Italian railroads.

Comin also loved numbers from an early age, and by about eighth grade would go to the public library to delve into math textbooks about calculus and analytical geometry that were far beyond what he was being taught in school. Later, in high school, Comin enjoyed being challenged by a math and physics teacher who in class would ask him questions about extremely advanced concepts.

“My classmates were looking at me like I was an alien, but I had a lot of fun,” Comin says.

Unafraid to venture alone into more rarefied areas of study, Comin nonetheless sought community, and appreciated the rapport he had with his teacher.

“He gave me the kind of interaction I was looking for, because otherwise it would have been just me and my books,” Comin says. “He helped transform an isolated activity into a social one. He made me feel like I had a buddy.”

By the end of his undergraduate studies at the University of Trieste, Comin says he decided on experimental physics, to have “the opportunity to explore and observe physical phenomena.”

He visited a nearby research facility that houses the Elettra Synchrotron to look for a research position where he could work on his undergraduate thesis, and became interested in all of the materials science research being conducted there. Drawn to community as well as the research, he chose a group that was investigating how the atoms and molecules in a liquid can rearrange themselves to become a glass.

“This one group struck me. They seemed to really enjoy what they were doing, and they had fun outside of work and enjoyed the outdoors,” Comin says. “They seemed to be a nice group of people to be part of. I think I cared more about the social environment than the specific research topic.”

By the time Comin was finishing his master’s, also in Trieste, and wanted to get a PhD, his focus had turned to electrons inside a solid rather than the behavior of atoms and molecules. Having traveled “literally almost everywhere in Europe,” Comin says he wanted to experience a different research environment outside of Europe.

He told his academic advisor he wanted to go to North America and was connected with Andrea Damascelli, the Canada Research Chair in Electronic Structure of Quantum Materials at the University of British Columbia, who was working on high-temperature superconductors. Comin says he was fascinated by the behavior of the electrons in the materials Damascelli and his group were studying.

“It’s almost like a quantum choreography, particles that dance together” rather than moving in many different directions, Comin says.

Comin’s subsequent postdoctoral work at the University of Toronto, focusing on optoelectronic materials — which can interact with photons and electrical energy — ignited his passion for connecting a material’s properties to its functionality and bridging the gap between fundamental physics and real-world applications.

Since coming to MIT in 2016, Comin has continued to delight in the behavior of electrons. He and Joe Checkelsky, associate professor of physics, had a breakthrough with a new class of materials in which electrons, very atypically, are nearly stationary.

Such materials could be used to explore zero energy loss, such as from power lines, and new approaches to quantum computing.

“It’s a very peculiar state of matter,” says Comin. “Normally, electrons are just zapping around. If you put an electron in a crystalline environment, what that electron will want to do is hop around, explore its neighbors, and basically be everywhere at the same time.”

The more sedentary electrons occurred in materials where a structure of interlaced triangles and hexagons tended to trap the electrons on the hexagons and, because the electrons all have the same energy, they create what’s called an electronic flat band, referring to the pattern that is created when they are measured. Their existence was predicted theoretically, but they had not been observed.

Comin says he and his colleagues made educated guesses on where to find flat bands, but they were elusive. After three years of research, however, they had a breakthrough.

“We put a sample material in an experimental chamber, we aligned the sample to do the experiment and started the measurement and, literally, five to 10 minutes later, we saw this beautiful flat band on the screen,” Comin says. “It was so clear, like this thing was basically screaming, How could you not find me before?

“That started off a whole area of research that is growing and growing — and a new direction in our field.”

Comin’s later research into certain two-dimensional materials with the thickness of single atoms and an internal structural feature of chirality, or right-handedness or left-handedness similar to how a spiral has a twist in one direction or the other, has yielded another new realm to explore.

By controlling the chirality, “there are interesting prospects of realizing a whole new class of devices” that could store information in a way that’s more robust and much more energy-efficient than current methods, says Comin, who is affiliated with MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory. Such devices would be especially valuable as the amount of data available generally and technologies like artificial intelligence grow exponentially.

While investigating these previously unknown properties of certain materials, Comin is characteristically adventurous in his pursuit.

“I embrace the randomness that nature throws at you,” he says. “It appears random, but there could be something behind it, so we try variations, switch things around, see what nature serves you. Much of what we discover is due to luck — and the rest boils down to a mix of knowledge and intuition to recognize when we’re seeing something new, something that’s worth exploring.”

Equipping doctors with AI co-pilots

Most doctors go into medicine because they want to help patients. But today’s health care system requires that doctors spend hours each day on other work — searching through electronic health records (EHRs), writing documentation, coding and billing, prior authorization, and utilization management — often surpassing the time they spend caring for patients. The situation leads to physician burnout, administrative inefficiencies, and worse overall care for patients.

Ambience Healthcare is working to change that with an AI-powered platform that automates routine tasks for clinicians before, during, and after patient visits.

“We build co-pilots to give clinicians AI superpowers,” says Ambience CEO Mike Ng MBA ’16, who co-founded the company with Nikhil Buduma ’17. “Our platform is embedded directly into EHRs to free up clinicians to focus on what matters most, which is providing the best possible patient care.”

Ambience’s suite of products handles pre-charting and real-time AI scribing, and assists with navigating the thousands of rules to select the right insurance billing codes. The platform can also send after-visit summaries to patients and their families in different languages to keep everyone informed and on the same page.

Ambience is already being used across roughly 40 large institutions such as UCSF Health, the Memorial Hermann Health System, St. Luke’s Health System, John Muir Health, and more. Clinicians leverage Ambience in dozens of languages and more than 100 specialties and subspecialties, in settings like the emergency department, hospital inpatient settings, and the oncology ward.

The founders say clinicians using Ambience save two to three hours per day on documentation, report lower levels of burnout, and develop higher-quality relationships with their patients.

From problem to product to platform

Ng worked in finance until getting an up-close look at the health care system after he fractured his back in 2012. He was initially misdiagnosed and put on the wrong care plan, but he learned a lot about the U.S. health system in the process, including how the majority of clinicians’ days are spent documenting visits, selecting billing codes, and completing other administrative tasks. The average clinician only spends 27 percent of their time on direct patient care.

In 2014, Ng decided to enter the MIT Sloan School of Management. During his first week, he attended the “t=0” celebration of entrepreneurship hosted by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, where he met Buduma. The pair became fast friends, and they ended up taking classes together including 15.378 (Building an Entrepreneurial Venture) and 15.392 (Scaling Entrepreneurial Ventures).

“MIT was an incredible training ground to evaluate what makes a great company and learn the foundations of building a successful company,” Ng says.

Buduma had gone through his own journey to discover problems with the health care system. After immigrating to the U.S. from India as a child and battling persistent health issues, he had watched his parents struggle to navigate the U.S. medical system. While completing his bachelor’s degree at MIT, he was also steeped in the AI research community and wrote an early textbook on modern AI and deep learning.

In 2016, Ng and Buduma founded their first company in San Francisco — Remedy Health — which operated its own AI-powered health care platform. In the process of hiring clinicians, taking care of patients, and implementing technology themselves, they developed an even deeper appreciation for the challenges that health care organizations face.

During that time, they also got an inside look at advances in AI. Google’s Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, a major investor in Remedy and now in Ambience, led a research group inside of Google Brain to invent the transformer architecture. Ng and Buduma say they were among the first to put transformers into production to support their own clinicians at Remedy. Subsequently, several of their friends and housemates went on to start the large language model group within OpenAI. Their friends’ work formed the research foundations that ultimately led to ChatGPT.

“It was very clear that we were at this inflection point where we were going to have this class of general-purpose models that were going to get exponentially better,” Buduma says. “But I think we also noticed a big gap between those general-purpose models versus what actually would be robust enough to work in a clinic. Mike and I decided in 2020 that there should be a team that specifically focused on fine-tuning these models for health care and medicine.”

The founders started Ambience by building an AI-powered scribe that works on phones and laptops to record the details of doctor-patient visits in a HIPAA-compliant system that preserves patient privacy. They quickly saw that the models needed to be fine-tuned for each area of medicine, and they slowly expanded specialty coverage one by one in a multiyear process.

The founders also realized their scribes needed to fit within back-office operations like insurance coding and billing.

“Documentation isn’t just for the clinician, it’s also for the revenue cycle team,” Buduma says. “We had to go back and rewrite all of our algorithms to be coding-aware. There are literally tens of thousands of coding rules that change every year and differ by specialty and contract type.”

From there, the founders built out models for clinicians to make referrals and to send comprehensive summaries of visits to patients.

“In most care settings before Ambience, when a patient and their family left the clinic, whatever the patient and their family wrote down was what they remembered from the visit,” Buduma says. “That’s one of the features that physicians love most, because they are trying to create the best experience for patients and their families. By the time that patient is in the parking lot, they already have a really robust, high-quality summary of exactly what you talked about and all the shared decision-making around your visit in their portal.”

Democratizing health care

By improving physician productivity, the founders believe they’re helping the health care system manage a chronic shortage of clinicians that’s expected to grow in coming years.

“In health care, access is still a huge problem,” Ng says. “Rural Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of preventable hospitalization, and half of that is attributed to a lack of access to specialty care.”

With Ambience already helping health systems manage razor-thin margins by streamlining administrative tasks, the founders have a longer-term vision to help increase access to the best clinical information across the country.

“There’s a really exciting opportunity to make expertise at some of the major academic medical centers more democratized across the U.S.,” Ng says. “Right now, there’s just not enough specialists in the U.S. to support our rural populations. We hope to help scale the knowledge of the leading specialists in the country through an AI infrastructure layer, especially as these models become more clinically intelligent.”

miRoncol Unveils Breakthrough Blood Test to Detect 12+ Early-Stage Cancers

In a significant advancement for cancer detection, miRoncol, a medtech startup, has completed proof-of-concept studies for a groundbreaking blood test capable of detecting multiple types of cancer at early stages. This innovative test utilizes cutting-edge technologies, including microRNA (miRNA) research and machine learning. By identifying cancers…

20+ Portfolio Video Templates for Creatives in 2024 – Speckyboy

A compelling portfolio is an important part of every designer’s promotional material. Potential clients and employers will use it to judge your skill level. It could be the difference in whether they contact you.

With that in mind, why not go all out? For example, employing video is a great way to grab a viewer’s attention. You can make something unique – a memorable experience that beats a plain old website.

Starting a video package from scratch can be tedious. But the right video template can help you get off to a roaring start. Start up your editing software, make a few customizations, and you’ve got an attractive presentation.

We’ve put together this collection of amazing portfolio video templates. They offer a professional look and are all easy to customize. You’ll find options for After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro. Take your portfolio design to the next level!

Portfolio Templates for After Effects

Professional Portfolio Pack for After Effects

Use this portfolio template to add a clean and modern look to your presentation. It’s versatile and can be used to showcase different types of projects. Complete with snappy animations, you’ll be sure to keep viewers engaged.

Modern Portfolio & Promo Template for After Effects

Add your photos and text to bring this video to life. There is space to include your skills, along with a short biography. It’s an easy way to introduce yourself to potential clients.

Black & White Animated Portfolio Template for After Effects

Want to make a strong first impression? This Ultra HD (3840×2160) black and white video template has everything you need. It features a modular structure for easier edits and includes a detailed tutorial. Combine fast-paced animation with classic looks.

Creative Portfolio Promo Template for After Effects

Bright and colorful, this video template will show off your resume in style. It includes several professional-grade animation effects and transitions. Customize the video by adding your photo and listing your skills.

Professional Photography Portfolio Template for After Effects

Share your best images with this incredible photography portfolio template. There’s room for over 100 photos and over a dozen text placeholders. Put your photos into motion and wow your visitors.

Portfolio & Resume Video Template for After Effects

This template includes 10+ unique slides to show your skills and past projects. Use the included tutorial to learn how to swap colors, images, and more. You’ll have a video that represents your personal brand in no time.

Portfolio Templates for DaVinci Resolve

Colorful Portfolio Presentation Template for DaVinci Resolve

This template uses bold colors and precise movement to create a professional look. The special effects will keep viewers glued to the screen. It’s an excellent choice for those looking to make a statement with their portfolio.

Creative Folds Portfolio Template for DaVinci Resolve

Geometric shapes play a huge role in this portfolio template. Each slide features ultra-smooth animation and attention-getting effects. There’s never a dull moment – making this presentation a hit with potential clients and employers.

Portfolio Slides Video Template for DaVinci Resolve

Use this template to add a touch of fun and personality to your portfolio. It features hand-drawn elements and typography. The vibe is perfect for visual artists and illustrators who want to connect with viewers on a personal level.

Photography Portfolio Video Template for DaVinci

Attractive and to the point, this video template makes it easy to tell your story. You’ll find a clean, modern look and plenty of space to add custom text and images. The modular structure means an easier editing experience.

Portfolio Templates for Premiere Pro

Professional Photographer Portfolio Template for Premier Pro

Colorful and creative, you can use this template to create a top-notch portfolio presentation. List your skills, show off past projects, and captivate your audience. The aesthetic is unique and easy on the eyes.

Elegant Fashion Portfolio Template for Premiere Pro

This template is aimed at fashion designers, photographers, and other creative professionals. Clever use of color and typography makes it easy for your work to take center stage. It’s a great choice for those looking to project a modern lifestyle.

Portfolio & Promo Template for Premiere Pro

Create a compelling video portfolio presentation with this template for Premiere Pro. It combines rounded shapes with beautifully synchronized motion for a contemporary look. Customize it with your images and text to boost your brand.

Various Portfolio Titles Template for Premiere Pro

Use this set of slick video slides to share your biography and past projects. The template features plenty of animation effects while allowing your content to stand out. Viewers will appreciate this simple and enticing presentation.

Photography Portfolio MOGRT for Premiere Pro

Make your photography the center of attention with this high-octane video template. You’ll find a minimalist approach to text with fast-paced photo collages. The result is an entertaining way to introduce your work to the world.

Resume & CV Presentation Template for Premiere Pro

Bold typography and smooth transitions make this template a winner. It’s the perfect fit for displaying your skills and work experience. There’s also room to feature your past projects as well.

Portfolio Templates for Final Cut Pro

Stylish Portfolio Slideshow Template for Final Cut Pro

Here’s a template that features 4k resolution and magical effects. Use it to showcase your photography, videos, or graphic design work. The muted colors and fun personality make it an excellent choice for artists.

Urban Portfolio Slides Video Template for Final Cut Pro

Serious retro-futuristic vibes are coming from this video template. Dark backgrounds are mixed with neon text to make your message loud and clear. Add your best projects and take viewers back to the future.

Animated Portfolio Lower Thirds for Final Cut Pro

Let your projects do the talking with this slick lower-thirds template. It offers outstanding typography and supports 4k video. Choose from seven animated lower-third presentations and customize the colors to match your brand.

Web Portfolio Video Template for Final Cut Pro

This template is perfect for web designers, with space to share your favorite work. It includes classic film and glitch effects that look amazing but won’t overwhelm viewers. Use it to bring your website portfolio to life.

Do More with Your Online Portfolio

The video templates above are an opportunity to do more with your portfolio. They add another dimension to your work and offer a different way to reach prospective clients. It’s something you can share and update as your career evolves.

Ready to take that next step? Start experimenting and see how video can improve your visibility.

Empowering Data Control: Data Sovereignty as the Strategic Imperative in the AI Era

In today’s fast-moving world of digital transformation, data is much more than a resource—it’s the lifeblood of innovation. Across industries, businesses are leaning heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) to make quicker decisions, optimize operations, and unlock new opportunities. But with AI’s dependence on massive volumes of…

Don Schuerman, CTO at Pegasystems – Interview Series

Don Schuerman is chief technology officer and vice-president of product marketing at Pegasystems, responsible for Pega’s platform and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. He has 20 years’ experience delivering enterprise software solutions for Fortune 500 organisations, with a focus on digital transformation, mobility, analytics, business process…

How Adobe is Shielding Artists from AI Misuse

In recent years, the growing ability of generative AI to create realistic visuals, mimic artistic styles, and produce entirely new forms of expression has redefined how art is made and experienced. While this transformation offers remarkable opportunities for innovation and productivity in the creative sector, it…

Q&A: How the Europa Clipper will set cameras on a distant icy moon

With its latest space mission successfully launched, NASA is set to return for a close-up investigation of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Yesterday at 12:06 p.m. EDT, the Europa Clipper lifted off via SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on a mission that will take a close look at Europa’s icy surface. Five years from now, the spacecraft will visit the moon, which hosts a water ocean covered by a water-ice shell. The spacecraft’s mission is to learn more about the composition and geology of the moon’s surface and interior and to assess its astrobiological potential. Because of Jupiter’s intense radiation environment, Europa Clipper will conduct a series of flybys, with its closest approach bringing it within just 16 miles of Europa’s surface.

MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Senior Research Scientist Jason Soderblom is a co-investigator on two of the spacecraft’s instruments: the Europa Imaging System and the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa. Over the past nine years, he and his fellow team members have been building imaging and mapping instruments to study Europa’s surface in detail to gain a better understanding of previously seen geologic features, as well as the chemical composition of the materials that are present. Here, he describes the mission’s primary plans and goals.

Q: What do we currently know about Europa’s surface?

A: We know from NASA Galileo mission data that the surface crust is relatively thin, but we don’t know how thin it is. One of the goals of the Europa Clipper mission is to measure the thickness of that ice shell. The surface is riddled with fractures that indicate tectonism is actively resurfacing the moon. Its crust is primarily composed of water ice, but there are also exposures of non-ice material along these fractures and ridges that we believe include material coming up from within Europa.

One of the things that makes investigating the materials on the surface more difficult is the environment. Jupiter is a significant source of radiation, and Europa is relatively close to Jupiter. That radiation modifies the materials on the surface; understanding that radiation damage is a key component to understanding the composition.

This is also what drives the clipper-style mission and gives the mission its name: we clip by Europa, collect data, and then spend the majority of our time outside of the radiation environment. That allows us time to download the data, analyze it, and make plans for the next flyby.

Q: Did that pose a significant challenge when it came to instrument design?

A: Yes, and this is one of the reasons that we’re just now returning to do this mission. The concept of this mission came about around the time of the Galileo mission in the late 1990s, so it’s been roughly 25 years since scientists first wanted to carry out this mission. A lot of that time has been figuring out how to deal with the radiation environment.

There’s a lot of tricks that we’ve been developing over the years. The instruments are heavily shielded, and lots of modeling has gone into figuring exactly where to put that shielding. We’ve also developed very specific techniques to collect data. For example, by taking a whole bunch of short observations, we can look for the signature of this radiation noise, remove it from the little bits of data here and there, add the good data together, and end up with a low-radiation-noise observation.

Q: You’re involved with the two different imaging and mapping instruments: the Europa Imaging System (EIS) and the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa (MISE). How are they different from each other?

A: The camera system [EIS] is primarily focused on understanding the physics and the geology that’s driving processes on the surface, looking for: fractured zones; regions that we refer to as chaos terrain, where it looks like icebergs have been suspended in a slurry of water and have jumbled around and mixed and twisted; regions where we believe the surface is colliding and subduction is occurring, so one section of the surface is going beneath the other; and other regions that are spreading, so new surface is being created like our mid-ocean ridges on Earth.

The spectrometer’s [MISE] primary function is to constrain the composition of the surface. In particular, we’re really interested in sections where we think liquid water might have come to the surface. Understanding what material is from within Europa and what material is being deposited from external sources is also important, and separating that is necessary to understand the composition of those coming from Europa and using that to learn about the composition of the subsurface ocean.

There is an intersection between those two, and that’s my interest in the mission. We have color imaging with our imaging system that can provide some crude understanding of the composition, and there is a mapping component to our spectrometer that allows us to understand how the materials that we’re detecting are physically distributed and correlate with the geology. So there’s a way to examine the intersection of those two disciplines — to extrapolate the compositional information derived from the spectrometer to much higher resolutions using the camera, and to extrapolate the geological information that we learn from the camera to the compositional constraints from the spectrometer.

Q: How do those mission goals align with the research that you’ve been doing here at MIT?

A: One of the other major missions that I’ve been involved with was the Cassini mission, primarily working with the Visual and Infrared Spectrometer team to understand the geology and composition of Saturn’s moon Titan. That instrument is very similar to the MISE instrument, both in function and in science objective, and so there’s a very strong connection between that and the Europa Clipper mission. For another mission, for which I’m leading the camera team, is working to retrieve a sample of a comet, and my primary function on that mission is understanding the geology of the cometary surface.

Q: What are you most excited about learning from the Europa Clipper mission?

A: I’m most fascinated with some of these very unique geologic features that we see on the surface of Europa, understanding the composition of the material that is involved, and the processes that are driving those features. In particular, the chaos terrains and the fractures that we see on the surface.

Q: It’s going to be a while before the spacecraft finally reaches Europa. What work needs to be done in the meantime?

A: A key component of this mission will be the laboratory work here on Earth, expanding our spectral libraries so that when we collect a spectrum of Europa’s surface, we can compare that to laboratory measurements. We are also in the process of developing a number of models to allow us to, for example, understand how a material might process and change starting in the ocean and working its way up through fractures and eventually to the surface. Developing these models now is an important piece before we collect these data, then we can make corrections and get improved observations as the mission progresses. Making the best and most efficient use of the spacecraft resources requires an ability to reprogram and refine observations in real-time.