Kavita Bala

Kavita Bala (born 1971; in Bombay, India) is an American computer scientist, academic and entrepreneur. She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. After serving as department chair from 2018–2020, she was appointed Dean of the Faculty for Computing and Information Science, now known as the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Beginning, January 1, 2025, Bala will serve as Cornell's 17th provost

Bala’s research expertise is in computer vision and graphics. Her work was recognized in 2020 by the international Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Technique - ACM SIGGRAPH - for “fundamental contributions to physically-based and scalable rendering, material modeling, perception for graphics, and visual recognition.” Her early research focused on realistic, physically-based rendering and includes seminal work on scalable rendering, notably the development of Lightcuts and other approximate illumination algorithms, as well as contributions to volumetric and procedural modeling of textiles. Currently, Bala is studying recognition of materials, styles, and other object attributes in images.

Her work on 3D Mandalas was featured at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York. Provided by Wikipedia