Kavita Bala

Kavita Bala is the 17th provost of Cornell University and professor of computer science. Previously, she served as the inaugural dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and chair of the Department of Computer Science. In her research, she specializes in computer vision and computer graphics, leading research in visual recognition and search; and material modeling and perception. She co-founded GrokStyle, a visual recognition AI company that drew IKEA as a client, and was acquired by Facebook in 2019. Bala is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2025), an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow (2019), Fellow of the SIGGRAPH Academy (2020), and recipient of the Computer Graphics Achievement Award (2020).