Academic concentrate on the finding out where his solution works. Engineer mostly concerned with situations what to do if it doesn't.

Download Bundler + PMVS 3D reconstructions packages and feed video into them. Those packages are fairly stable and reliable and they give you 3D point cloud. After that convert 3D point cloud to surface - there are several packages which can do it, but I can't give any advice here - I don't know any *stable* package, all of them are research soft - memory leaks, random crashes, difficult parameters setting, compilation problems etc. If you want to learn algorithms himself that's at least year worth of math and computer vision (if you are not math/phys major). "Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision" usually recommended for starters, but this book is thoroughly obsolete now. All the modern staff is in the papers.

Immortal telepathic cyborg overlords will overthrow governments, force human peons to farm ocean while their robotic henchmen impregnate hapless human females.

Start with some freelance or even hobby jobs, get some experience under your belt with apps which you can refer to in your resume. With enough finished projects(even small) to show you can safely look for permanent position (if you will want it still after freelancing). Job market is always hungry for mobile coders who can actually code, not copy-paste.

The problem is that whales could be semi-sentient, on the level of small human children or somewhere not far from great apes. Killing whales not for survival but for luxury food create dangerous precedent. As the the brain-computer interfaces progress appearance of super-intelligent cyborgs is becoming if not likely, but at least not impossible. We don't want to give them precedent of killing less intelligent for fun.

And use even more complex math, which is usual in computer vision (it seems related to poster area) it can be safely open sourced and become source of small income - modification&maintenance. It's very likely that competitors wouldn't be able modify complex code based on math-heavy algorithm to their need. Even if they have this ability it would worth a lot of resources to them for small gain - if they have that kind of expertise they likely already have some in-house analog. If the code is a small improvement on well-known method, there is no advantage to open source it indeed.

are often best employees - most knowledgeable in the field or most hardworking or with huge experience. Only they can get away with obnoxious behavior, other would be get rid off or ostracized. Every person with habit of interrupting I knew was expert and generally very smart.

By giving him job with salary better that one of Nigerian garbage collector in Abuja.

If you want emphasize uncompromising efficiency go for Cheka To point out massive participation and instill fear in the enemy use NKVD For respectability and all-encompassing permeability use KGB

Could be pretty interesting.