Kavita Bala: Visual Discovery and Understanding from Micron to Global Scale

We use visual input to understand and explore the world we live in: the shapes we hold, the materials we touch and feel, the activities we do, the scenes we navigate, the environment we live in, and more.  Powerful sensing technologies can now image the world from micron scale in computer tomography to planet scale in satellite imagery. Leveraging these technologies we can understand our visual world at a range of scales from the individual appearance of objects to a collective understanding of world-scale events.

In this talk, I will describe my group's research on visual discovery and understanding, including models for realistic visual appearance, reconstruction of shape and materials, and world-scale visual discovery of patterns and trends across geography and time.

Kavita Bala is the dean of the Bowers College of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. Bala received her S.M. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before becoming dean, she served as the chair of the Cornell Computer Science department.  Bala leads research in computer vision and computer graphics in visual discovery and recognition; material modeling and acquisition; physically based rendering; and perception. She co-founded GrokStyle, a visual recognition AI company, which drew IKEA as a client, and was acquired by Facebook in 2019.

Bala is the recipient of the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award, and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the SIGGRAPH Academy. Bala has received multiple teaching awards, has authored the graduate-level textbook “Advanced Global Illumination”, and has served as the Editor-in-Chief of Transactions on Graphics (TOG).