Bio

Kavita Bala, a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and professor, became the 17th provost of Cornell University on January 1, 2025. She brings a distinguished record of leadership and scholarship to the role. Prior to her appointment, Bala served as the inaugural dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and as chair of Cornell's department of Computer Science. Her foundational research in computer vision, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence has been recognized by election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and by induction as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). For more information see: Cornell's Provost, Cornell Provost's initiatives. (Also, see National Academies New Heroes profile.)

Research Interests

My research interests span computer vision, computer graphics, and human perception, including:

• Recognition: material recognition, visual search and detection
• Modeling: material and shape acquisition; fabric modeling; material representation and editing
• Rendering: realistic, physically-based rendering; scalable rendering
• Perception: translucency perception; material and lighting perception

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Master of Science (SM), EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Bachelor of Technology (BTech), Computer Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Awards and Recognition

• SIGGRAPH 2026 Test-of-time Award, Intrinsic Images in the Wild
• Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2025
• SIGGRAPH 2025 Test-of-time Award, Learning Visual Similarity for Product Design With Convolutional Neural Networks (podcast)
• IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award, 2021
• ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, 2020 [citation]
• ACM SIGGRAPH Academy, 2020
• ACM Fellow, 2019
• Fiona Ip Li '78 and Donald Li '75 Excellence in Teaching Award, College of Engineering, 2015
• Best Paper Award, Computational Aesthetics, 2014
• CACM Research Highlight, 2014
• CACM Research Highlight, 2009
• James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, College of Engineering, 2009
• James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, College of Engineering, 2006
• Affinito-Stewart Award, PCCW, 2005
• MIT EECS Masters Award, 1995

Recent Publications

	MONITRS: Monitoring with Intermittent High-Resolution Sensing NeurIPS '25 (spotlight)
	Towards LLM Agents for Earth Observation Terrabytes, ICML Workshop, '25
	DiSciPLE: Learning Interpretable Programs for Scientific Visual Discovery CVPR '25
	Scale-Aware Recognition in Satellite Images under Resource Constraints ICLR '25
	AllClear: A Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Cloud Removal in Satellite Imagery NeurIPS '25 (Track on Datasets and Benchmarks)
Past projects
	I have implemented a new rendering model to capture the fine lighting effects of stalactites and stalagmites. Satyan Coorg worked on creating the models of the stalactites and stalagmites.
	I captured the interference patterns formed by thin oil films/slicks on water using Renderman.