Kavita Bala

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, 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

• 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)

Complete List of Publications...

Broad Audience Talks

• CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) Keynote (2022)
• Stanford Human AI Spring Conference Keynote (2022)
• Eurographics Keynote (2020)
• Cornell Silicon Valley: Bridging the Virtual and the Real
• Cornell Summer Series: Virtual Realism and Computer Graphics
• Interviewing Charlie Van Loan

Press

• Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science: Gift naming the Bowers College, Cornell Silicon Valley
• General interviews and coverage: ACM Member, LDV, Wired, CNN Tech, Observer, Austrian Radio Interview, Daily Caller, Small Biz Trends
• Deep Photo Style Transfer and Harmonization: 9to5Mac, The Verge, Gizmodo, Engadget, DPReview, Petapixel, 2-minute videos on photo style transfer, 2-minute videos on harmonization, Slash Gear, Apple Insider, The Next Web, BGR, New Atlas, Tech Spot, Uber Gizmo, Cornell Chronicle, .... Search on "deep photo style transfer" and "deep harmonization" for a full list of press coverage.
• Visual Search and GrokStyle: Forbes (2020), T_HQ (2020), TechCrunch (2018), TechCrunch (2017), Science Mag, AI Business, Digial Trends, Cornell Sun, IKEA Press release, ...
• StreetStyle and Fashion: Chronicle, Primed (KUOW), MIT Technology Review, Digital Trends, physorg, Chronicle, Press Release Point, Newswise, ...
• Rendering: Economist
• Mandala: NY Times

Professional Activities

• Board of Trustees, Toyota Technological Institute, Chicago
• Emeritus board member, ColorStack (2023--2025)
• Advisor, Women In Graphics Research (WiGraph)
• Member, SIGGRAPH Academy Selection Committee, 2020--2023
• Member, SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee, 2020--2023
• Member, SIGGRAPH Papers Advisory Group, 2018--2023
• Chair, Computer Science Department, Cornell University, 2018--2020
• Faculty Fellow, Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, 2016--
• Founder and Chief Scientist, GrokStyle (acquired by Facebook), 2015--2018
• Editor-in-Chief, Transactions on Graphics. 2015--2018
• Papers Chair:
  • ICCP 2021 (co-chairs: Yoav Schechner, Ori Katz): TPAMI Guest Editorial
  • ICVGIP 2012 (co-chairs: Sharat Chandran, Bill Triggs)
  • SIGGRAPH Asia 2011
  • Pacific Graphics 2010 (co-chairs: Pierre Alliez, Kun Zhou)
  • Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2005 (co-chairs: Phil Dutre)
  • 10th IVMSP Workshop: Perception and Visual Signal Analysis (area chair)
• Senior Associate Editor:
  • Transactions on Graphics, 2013--2014
• Associate Editor:
  • Computer Graphics Forum, 2012--2015
  • Transactions on Graphics, 2012-2013
  • Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2008-2012
• Papers Program Committees:
  • 2022: Area Chair CVPR
  • 2021: Area Chair ICCV
  • 2020: Area Chair CVPR
  • 2018: Area Chair CVPR, SIGGRAPH
  • 2017: SIGGRAPH, ICCP
  • 2016: SIGGRAPH Asia
  • 2015: SIGGRAPH
  • 2014: SIGGRAPH Asia, Eurographics, Eurographics Symposium on Rendering
  • 2013: Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, Pacific Graphics
  • 2012: SIGGRAPH, Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, High Performance Graphics
  • 2011: SIGGRAPH
  • 2010: SIGGRAPH Asia, Applied Perception on Graphics and Visualization (APGV), Interactive 3D Graphics (I3D)
  • 2009: SIGGRAPH 09, Interactive 3D Graphics (I3D), High Performance Graphics, Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR), Pacific Graphics (PG)
  • 2008: SIGGRAPH Asia, Eurographics, Interactive 3D Graphics (I3D), Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR), Pacific Graphics (PG), Interactive Ray Tracing (IRT), Symposium on Point-Based Graphics (PBG)
  • 2007: SIGGRAPH, Symposium on Point-based Graphics (PBG), Pacific Graphics (PG), Interactive 3D Graphics (I3D)
  • 2006: SIGGRAPH, Symposium on Point-based Graphics (PBG), Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR),Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing (IRT)
  • 2005: Symposium on Point-based Graphics (PBG), Graphics Interface (GI)
  • 2004: SIGGRAPH, Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR), Pacific Graphics (PG) 04, Symposium on Point-based Graphics (PBG)
  • 2003: SIGGRAPH, Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR)
  • 2002: Eurographics Rendering Workshop (EGWR)
• Papers Advisory Board: SIGGRAPH 2023, SIGGRAPH Asia 2015, SIGGRAPH Asia 2014, SIGGRAPH Asia 2013, SIGGRAPH 2012, SIGGRAPH Asia 2012, SIGGRAPH 2011, SIGGRAPH Asia 2010
• Steering Committee: Eurographics Symposium on Rendering
• Posters Program Committee, SIGGRAPH 04

Courses

• CS6644, Modeling the World (Fall 14)
• CS4670/5670, Cornell's Introduction to Computer Vision (Spring 15, Spring 16)
• CS5625, Cornell's Advanced Interactive Graphics (Spring 13, Spring 12)
• CS4620/4621/5620/5621, Cornell's Introduction to Graphics and Practicum (Fall 15, Fall 12, Fall 11)
• CS5620, Cornell's advanced interactive graphics course (Fall 09)
• CS6620, Cornell's graduate advanced rendering graphics course (Spring 09)
• CS 3410, Cornell's Computer System Organization and Programming Course (Spring 14, Fall 08)
• CS 7690, Cornell's Graphics Seminar (Fall 15, Spring 15, Spring 13, Spring 12, Spring 09)
• CS 316, Cornell's Systems Programming (Fall 07)
• CS467/468, Cornell's Graphics II and Graphics Practicum (Spring 07, Spring 06, Spring 04)
• CS665, Cornell's graduate advanced interactive graphics course (Spring 08, Fall 06, Fall 04, Fall 03)
• ENGRG 150, Freshman advising (Fall 06)
• CS 718, Computer Graphics Seminar (Spring 07, Fall 04, Fall 03, Spring 03)
• Reusing Shading for Interactive Global Illumination (Game Developers Conference 04)
• Advanced Global Illumination (SIGGRAPH 02, SIGGRAPH 01)
• CS517, Cornell's graduate advanced graphics course (Fall 02, Fall 01)
• CS417 and CS 418, Cornell's introductory graphics course and practicum (Spring 02, Spring 01, Spring 00)

Books
	Phil Dutre, Kavita Bala, Philippe Bekaert.       Advanced Global Illumination      A K Peters, 2nd Edition      August 2006, Natick, MA      Bibtex
	Editors: Kavita Bala and Phil Dutre.       Rendering Techniques 2005      Springer Verlag      June 2005, Konstanz, Germany
	Phil Dutre, Philippe Bekaert, and Kavita Bala.       Advanced Global Illumination      A K Peters, 1st Edition      July 2003, Natick, MA      Bibtex
Patents
	Inventors: Kavita Bala, Fujun Luan, Shuang Zhao.       Image rendering utlizing procedural yarn models      Patent No. 10,410,380      Sep 10, 2019
	Inventors: Ivaylo Boyadzhiev, Kavita Bala, Sylvain Paris.       Systems and Methods for Computational Lighting      Patent No. 9,483,815 B2      Nov 1 2016
Complete Publication List
	Shreelekha Revnkar, Utkarsh Mall, Cheng Perng Phoo, Kavita Bala, Bharath Hariharan.     MONITRS: Multimodal Observations of Natural Incidents Through Remote Sensing     NeurIPS '25     Paper, project page
	Chia Hsiang Kao, Wenting Zhao, Shreelekha Revnkar, Samuel Speas, Snehal Bhagat, Rajeev Datta, Cheng Perng Phoo, Utkarsh Mall, Carl Vondrick, Kavita Bala, Bharath Hariharan.     Towards LLM Agents for Earth Observation     Terrabytes, ICML Workshop '25     Paper, project page
	Utkarsh Mall, Cheng Perng Phoo, Mia Chiquier, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala, Carl Vondrick.     DiSciPLE: Learning Interpretable Programs for Scientific Visual Discovery     CVPR '25     Paper, project page
	Shreelekha Revankar, Cheng Perng Phoo, Utkarsh Mall, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala.     Scale-Aware Recognition in Satellite Images under Resource Constraints     ICLR '25     Paper, project page
	Hangyu Zhou, Chia-Hsiang Kao, Cheng Perng Phoo, Utkarsh Mall, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala.     AllClear: A Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Cloud Removal in Satellite Imagery     NeurIPS '25 (Track on Datasets and Benchmarks)     Paper, project page
	Utkarsh Mall, Cheng Perng Phoo, Meilin Kelsey Liu, Carl Vondrick, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala.     Remote Sensing Vision-Language Foundation Models without Annotations via Ground Remote Alignment     ICLR '24     Paper, project page
	Utkarsh Mall, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala.     Change-Aware Sampling and Contrastive Learning for Satellite Images     CVPR '23     Paper, project page
	Utkarsh Mall, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala.     Change Event Dataset for Discovery from Spatio-temporal Remote Sensing Imagery     NeurIPS 2022, Datasets and Benchmarks Track     Paper, supplementary material
	Utkarsh Mall, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala.     Zero-shot Learning Using Multimodal Descriptions     CVPR L3D-IVU Workshop, 2022     Paper, supplementary material
	Xi Deng, Fujun Luan, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala, Steve Marschner.     Reconstructing Translucent Objects using Differentiable Rendering     SIGGRAPH 2022     Paper, supplementary material
	Utkarsh Mall, Kavita Bala, Tamara Berg, Kristen Grauman.     Discovering Underground Maps from Fashion     WACV 2022
	Utkarsh Mall, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala.     Field-Guide Inspired Zero-Shot Learning     ICCV 2021     Project
	Hadi Alzayer, Hubert Lin, Kavita Bala.     AutoPhoto: Aesthetic Photo Capture using Reinforcement Learning     IROS 2021     Project
	Mitchell J.P. van Zuijlen, Hubert Lin, Kavita Bala, Sylvia C. Pont, Maarten W.A. Wijntjes.     Materials In Paintings (MIP): An interdisciplinary dataset for perception, art history, and computer vision     PLOS 2021     Project, Dataset
	Fujun Luan, Shuang Zhao, Kavita Bala, Zhao Dong.     Unified Shape and SVBRDF Recovery using Differentiable Monte Carlo Rendering     EGSR 2021     Project
	Kai Zhang*, Fujun Luan*, Qianqian Wang, Kavita Bala, Noah Snavely.     PhySG: Inverse Rendering with Spherical Gaussians for Physics-based Material Editing and Relighting     CVPR 2021     Project
	Hubert Lin, Mitchell van Zuijlen, Sylvia C. Pont, Maarten W.A. Wijntjes, Kavita Bala.     What can Style Transfer and Paintings do for Model Robustness     CVPR 2021
	Jang Hyun Cho, Utkarsh Mall, Kavita Bala, Bharath Hariharan.     PiCIE: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation using Invariance and Equivariance in Clustering     CVPR 2021     Project
	Scott Wehrwein, Kavita Bala, and Noah Snavely.     Scene Summarization via Motion Normalization     Transactions on Visualization and Graphics, 27(4), pp 2495-2501, 2021
	Bei Xiao, Shuang Zhao, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Wenyan Bi, Kavita Bala.     Effect of Geometric Sharpness on Translucent Material Perception     JOV, 2020
	Rachel Rose Getman, Denise Nicole Green, Kavita Bala, Utkarsh Mall, Nehal Rawat, Sonia Appasamy, Bharath Hariharan.     Machine Learning (ML) for Tracking Fashion Trends: Documenting the Frequency of the Baseball Cap     on Social Media and the Runway     Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, June 2020
	Fujun Luan, Shuang Zhao, Kavita Bala, and Ioannis Gkioulekas.     Langevin Monte Carlo Rendering with Gradient-based Adaptation     SIGGRAPH, 2020
	Yutao Han*, Hubert Lin*, Jacopo Banfi*, Kavita Bala, and Mark Campbell.     DeepSemanticHPPC: Hypothesis-based Planning over Uncertain Semantic Point Clouds     * are equal contribution authors.     ICRA, 2020
	Chengqian Che, Fujun Luan, Shuang Zhao, Kavita Bala, Ioannis Gkioulekas.     Towards Learning-based Inverse Subsurface Scattering     ICCP, 2020     Project
	Utkarsh Mall, Kevin Matzen, Bharath Hariharan, Noah Snavely Kavita Bala.     GeoStyle: Discovering Fashion Trends and Events     ICCV, 2019     Project
	Hubert Lin, Paul Upchurch, Kavita Bala.     Block Annotation: Better Image Annotation with Sub-Image Decomposition     ICCV, 2019     Project
	Hubert Lin, Melinos Averkiou, Evangelos Kalogerakis, Balazs Kovacs, Siddhant Ranade, Vladimir Kim, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Kavita Bala.     Learning Material-Aware Local Descriptors for 3D Shapes     3DV, 2018
	Fujun Luan, Sylvain Paris, Eli Shechtman, Kavita Bala.     Deep Painterly Harmonization     Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR), 2018     Project
	Balazs Kovacs, Peter O'Donovan, Kavita Bala, Aaron Hertzmann.     Context-Aware Asset Search for Graphic Design     Transactions on Visualization and Graphics (TVCG), 2018     Project
	Bei Xiao, Wenyan Bi, Shuang Zhao, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Kavita Bala.     Does geometric sharpness affect the perception of translucent materials?     Vision Sciences Society, 2018
	Pramook Khungurn, Rundong Wu, James Noeckel, Steve Marschner, Kavita Bala.     Fast Rendering of Fabric Micro-Appearance Models Under Directional and Spherical Gaussian Lights      SIGGRAPH Asia     Project
	Kevin Matzen, Kavita Bala, Noah Snavely.      StreetStyle: Exploring world-wide clothing styles from millions of photos      arXiv, June 2017     Project
	Fujun Luan, Shuang Zhao, Kavita Bala.     Fiber-Level On-the-Fly Procedural Textures     EGSR 2017     Project
	Fujun Luan, Sylvain Paris, Eli Shechtman, and Kavita Bala.     Deep Photo Style Transfer     CVPR 2017     Project
	Paul Upchurch, Jacob Gardner, Robert Pless, Noan Snavely, Kavita Bala, and Kilian Weinberger.     Deep Feature Interpolation for Image Content Changes     CVPR 2017     Project
	Balazs Kovacs, Sean Bell, Noah Snavely, and Kavita Bala.     Shading Annotations in the Wild     CVPR 2017     Project
	Nicolas Bonneel, Balazs Kovacs, Sylvain Paris, and Kavita Bala.     Intrinsic Decompositions for Image Editing     Eurographics STAR 2017 (State-of-the-Art Report), Computer Graphics Forum     Project
	Paul Upchurch, Daniel Sedra, Andrew Mullen, Haym Hirsh, and Kavita Bala.     Interactive Consensus Games for Labeling Images     HComp 2016     Project
	Shuang Zhao, Fujun Luan, Kavita Bala.     Fitting Procedural Yarn Models for Realistic Cloth Rendering     SIGGRAPH 2016     Project
	Sean Bell, Lawrence Zitnick, Kavita Bala, Ross Girshick.     Inside-Outside Net: Detecting Objects in Context with Skip Pooling and Recurrent Neural Networks     CVPR 2016     Project, Bibtex
	Ivaylo Boyadzhiev, Jiawen Chen, Sylvain Paris, Kavita Bala.     Do-It-Yourself Lighting Design for Product Videography     ICCP 2016     Project, Bibtex
	Andreas Veit, Balazs Kovacs, Sean Bell, Julian McAuley, Kavita Bala, Serge Belongie.     Learning Visual Clothing Style with Heterogeneous Dyadic Co-occurrences     ICCV 2015     Dec 2015      Bibtex
	Pramook Khungurn, Daniel Schroeder, Shuang Zhao, Kavita Bala, Steve Marschner.     Matching Micro-Appearance Models to Real Fabrics     TOG 2015 (presented at SIGGRAPH 2016)     Dec 2015      Project, Bibtex
	Scott Wehrwein, Kavita Bala, Noah Snavely.     Shadow Detection and Sun Direction in Photo Collections     3DV 2015     Nov 2015      Project, Bibtex
	Ivaylo Boyadzhiev, Kavita Bala, Sylvain Paris, Edward Adelson.     Band-Sifting Decomposition for Image Based Material Editing     TOG 2015 (presented at SIGGRAPH 2016)     Oct 2015      Project, Bibtex
	Sean Bell, Kavita Bala.     Learning visual similarity for product design with convolutional neural networks     SIGGRAPH 2015     Aug 2015      Project, Bibtex
	Sean Bell, Paul Upchurch, Noah Snavely, Kavita Bala.     Material Recognition in the Wild with the Materials in Context Database     CVPR 2015     Jun 2015      Project, Bibtex
	Ioannis Gkioulekas, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala, Ted Adelson, Todd Zickler.     On the Appearance of Translucent Edges     CVPR 2015     Jun 2015      Project, Bibtex
	Daniel Cabrini Hauagge, Scott Wehrwein, Kavita Bala, Noah Snavely     Photometric Ambient Occlusion for Intrinsic Image Decomposition     Special Issue of PAMI (extension of CVPR 2013 paper)     July 2015      Project, Bibtex
	Manohar Srikanth, Kavita Bala, Fredo Durand     Computational Rim Illumination of Dynamic Subjects Using Aerial Robots     Invited Paper from Computational Aesthetics     2015      Project, Bibtex
	Shuang Zhao, Wenzel Jakob, Steve Marschner, Kavita Bala.     Building Volumetric Appearance Models of Fabric Using Micro CT Imaging     CACM 2014 (previously published in SIGGRAPH 2011)     CACM, Vol 57, No. 11, Pages 98-105      Project, Bibtex
	Rui Wang, Xiangjin Yang, Yazhen Yuan, Wei Chen, Kavita Bala, Hujun Bao.     Automatic Shader Simplification Using Surface Signal Approximation     SIGGRAPH Asia 2014     Dec 2014      Project, Bibtex
	Sean Bell, Kavita Bala, Noah Snavely.     Intrinsic Images in the Wild     SIGGRAPH 2014     Aug 2014      Project, Bibtex
	Shuang Zhao, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Kavita Bala.     High-Order Similarity Relations in Radiative Transfer     SIGGRAPH 2014     Aug 2014      Project, Bibtex
	Manohar Srikanth, Kavita Bala, Fredo Durand     Computational Rim Illumination with Aerial Robots     Computational Aesthetics (Best Paper Award)     2014      Project, Bibtex
	Daniel Cabrini Hauagge, Scott Wehrwein, Paul Upchurch, Kavita Bala, Noah Snavely     Reasoning about Photo Collections using Models of Outdoor Illumination     British Machine Vision Conference     2014      Project, Bibtex
	Daniel Cabrini Hauagge, Scott Wehrwein, Noah Snavely, Kavita Bala     Reasoning about Photo Collections using Outdoor Illumination Models     Scene Understanding Workshop     2014      Project, Bibtex
	Laurent Belcour, Kavita Bala, Cyril Soler.     A Local Frequency Analysis of Light Scattering and Absorption     Transactions on Graphics'14 (to be presented at SIGGRAPH '14)     2014      Project, Bibtex
	Bei Xiao, Bruce Walter, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Todd Zickler, Edward Adelson, Kavita Bala.     Looking against the light: How perception of translucency depends on lighting direction     Journal of Vision '14     Mar 2014      Project, Bibtex
	Kavita Bala.     Modeling Cloth at Micron Resolution     Measuring, Modeling, and Reproducing Material Appearance (Invited Talk)     Jan 2014      Bibtex
	Ioannis Gkioulekas, Shuang Zhao, Kavita Bala, Todd Zickler, Anat Levin.     Inverse Volume Rendering with Material Dictionaries     SIGGRAPH Asia 2013     Nov 2013      Project, Bibtex
	Sean Bell, Paul Upchurch, Noah Snavely, Kavita Bala.      OpenSurfaces: A richly annotated catalog of surface appearance     SIGGRAPH 2013     July 2013      Project, Bibtex
	Shuang Zhao, Miloŝ Haŝan, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Kavita Bala.      Modular Flux Transfer: Efficient Rendering of High-Resolution Volumes with Repeated Structures     SIGGRAPH 2013     July 2013      Project, Bibtex
	Ivaylo Boyadzhiev, Sylvain Paris, Kavita Bala     User-Assisted Image Compositing for Photographic Lighting     SIGGRAPH 2013     July 2013      Project, Bibtex
	Daniel Cabrini Hauagge, Scott Wehrwein, Kavita Bala, Noah Snavely     Photometric Ambient Occlusion     CVPR 2013 (Oral)     June 2013      Project, Bibtex
	Ioannis Gkioulekas, Bei Xiao, Shuang Zhao, Ted Adelson, Todd Zickler, Kavita Bala     Understanding the Role of Phase Function in Translucent Appearance     Transactions on Graphics 2013, 32(5)     Oct 2013      Project, Bibtex
	Ivaylo Boyadhziev, Kavita Bala, Sylvain Paris, Fredo Durand.      User-Guided White Balance for Mixed Lighting Conditions     SIGGRAPH Asia 2012     November 2012      Project, Bibtex
	Bruce Walter, Pramook Khungurn, Kavita Bala.      Bidirectional Lightcuts     SIGGRAPH 2012     August 2012      Project, Bibtex
	Shuang Zhao, Wenzel Jakob, Steve Marschner, Kavita Bala.      Structure-Aware Synthesis for Predictive Woven Fabric Appearance     SIGGRAPH 2012     August 2012      Project, Bibtex
	Bei Xiao, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Asher Dunn, Shuang Zhao, Todd Zickler, Ted Adelson, Kavita Bala.      Effects of shape and color on the perception of translucency     VSS 2012     May 2012      Bibtex
	Adrian Jarabo, Tom Van Eyck, Veronica Sundstedt, Kavita Bala, Diego Gutierrez, Carol O' Sullivan.      Crowd Light: Evaluating the Perceived Fidelity of Illuminated Dynamic Scenes     Eurographics 2012     May 2012      Project, Bibtex
	Kavita Bala.      Predictive Rendering for Accurate Material Perception     HVEI 2012, Invited Paper     January 2012      Bibtex
	Nikhil Naik, Shuang Zhao, Andreas Velten, Ramesh Raskar, Kavita Bala.      Single View Reflectance Capture using Multiplexed Scattering and Time-of-flight Imaging     SIGGRAPH Asia 2011     December 2011      Project, Bibtex
	Shuang Zhao, Wenzel Jakob, Steve Marschner, Kavita Bala.      Building Volumetric Appearance Models of Fabric using Micro CT Imaging     SIGGRAPH 2011     August 2011      Project, Bibtex
	Adam Arbree, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Heterogeneous Subsurface Scattering Using the Finite Element Method     Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics '11     July 2011      Project, Bibtex
	Tomas Davidovic, Jaroslav Krivanek, Miloŝ Haŝan, Philipp Slusallek, Kavita Bala.      Combining Global and Local Virtual Lights for Detailed Glossy Illumination     SIGGRAPH Asia '10     December 2010, Seoul      Project, Bibtex
	Jaroslav Krivanek, James Ferwerda, Kavita Bala.      Effects of Global Illumination Approximations on Material Appearance     SIGGRAPH '10     July 2010, LA      Project, Supplementary Material, Bibtex
	Wenzel Jakob, Adam Arbree, Jon Moon, Kavita Bala, Steve Marschner.      A radiative transfer framework for rendering materials with anisotropic structure     SIGGRAPH '10     July 2010, LA      Project, Extended TR, Bibtex
	Edgar Velazquez-Armendariz, Shuang Zhao, Miloŝ Haŝan, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Automatic Bounding of Programmable Shaders for Efficient Global Illumination     SIGGRAPH Asia '09     December 2009, Yokohama, Japan      Project, Bibtex
	Miloŝ Haŝan, Jaroslav Krivanek, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Virtual Spherical Lights for Many-Light Rendering of Glossy Scenes     SIGGRAPH Asia '09     December 2009, Yokohama, Japan      Project, Bibtex
	Milind Kulkarni, Keshav Pingali, Bruce Walter, Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Kavita Bala, Paul Chew.      Optimistic Parallelism Requires Abstractions     Research Highlights, Communications of the ACM     September 2009      Bibtex
	Bruce Walter, Shuang Zhao, Nicolas Holzschuch, Kavita Bala.      Single Scattering in Refractive Media with Triangle Mesh Boundaries     SIGGRAPH '09     August 2009, New Orleans, LA      Project, Bibtex
	Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Kavita Bala, James Ferwerda.      Perception of Complex Aggregates     SIGGRAPH '08     August 2008, Los Angeles CA      Project, Bibtex
	James Ferwerda, Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Visual Equivalence: an object-based approach to image quality     Proceedings of IS&T 16th Color Imaging Conference (CIC) '08     Nov 2008      Project, Bibtex
	Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala, Milind Kulkarni, Keshav Pingali.      Fast Agglomerative Clustering for Rendering     Interactive Ray Tracing (IRT 2008)     August 2008, Los Angeles      Bibtex
	Miloŝ Haŝan, Edgar Velazquez-Armendariz, Fabio Pellacini, Kavita Bala.      Tensor Clustering for Rendering Many-Light Animations     Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR 2008)     June 2008, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina      Project, Bibtex
	Milind Kulkarni, Keshav Pingali, Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala, Paul Chew.      Scheduling Strategies for Optimistic Parallel Execution of Irregular Programs     Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA '08)     June 2008, Munich, Germany       Bibtex
	Adam Arbree, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Single-pass Scalable Subsurface Rendering with Lightcuts     Eurographics '08     April 2008, Crete      Project, Bibtex
	Ganesh Ramanarayanan, James Ferwerda, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Dimensionality of Visual Complexity in Computer Graphics Scenes     SPIE Human Vision and Electronic Imaging (HVEI) '08     Jan 2008, San Jose CA      Bibtex
	Milind Kulkarni, Keshav Pingali, Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala, Paul Chew.      Optimistic Parallelism Benefits from Data Partitioning     ASPLOS '08     Mar 2008, Seattle      Bibtex
	Ganesh Ramanarayanan, James Ferwerda, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Visual Equivalence: Towards a new standard for Image Fidelity     SIGGRAPH 2007     August 2007, San Diego CA      Project, Bibtex
	Miloŝ Haŝan, Fabio Pellacini, Kavita Bala.      Matrix Row-Column Sampling for the Many Lights Problem     SIGGRAPH 2007     August 2007, San Diego MA      Project, Bibtex
	Fabio Pellacini, Miloŝ Haŝan, Kavita Bala.      Interactive Cinematic Relighting with Global Illumination     Chapter 9, GPU Gems 3
	Milind Kulkarni, Keshav Pingali, Bruce Walter, Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Kavita Bala, Paul Chew.      Optimistic Parallelism Requires Abstractions     PLDI 2007     June 2007, San Diego MA      Bibtex
	Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Kavita Bala.      Constrained Texture Synthesis via Energy Minimization     IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics 2007     pp 167-178, Jan/Feb 2007      Bibtex
	Bruce Walter, Adam Arbree, Kavita Bala, Donald Greenberg.      Multidimensional lightcuts     SIGGRAPH 2006     pp 1081--1088, August 2006, Boston MA      Project, Bibtex
	Miloŝ Haŝan, Fabio Pellacini, Kavita Bala.      Direct-to-Indirect Transfer for Cinematic Relighting     SIGGRAPH 2006     pp 1089--1097, August 2006, Boston MA      Project, Bibtex
	Edgar Velazquez-Armendariz, Eugene Lee, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Implementing the Render Cache and the Edge-and-Point Image on Graphics Hardware     Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2006     pp 211-217, June 2006, Quebec Canada      Project, Bibtex
	Mike Donikian, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala, Sebastian Fernandez, and Donald Greenberg.      Accurate Direct Illumination Using Iterative Adaptive Sampling     Proceedings of Transaction on Visualization and Computer Graphics 2006     pp 353--364, May/June 2006      Bibtex
	Kavita Bala, Jim Ferwerda, and Bruce Walter.      Information-Preserving Imaging for Heterogeneous Networked Displays     Workshop on Information Visualization and Interaction Techniques for Collaboration across Multiple Displays     April 2006
	Bruce Walter, Sebastian Fernandez, Adam Arbree, Kavita Bala, Mike Donikian and Donald Greenberg.      Lightcuts: A Scalable Approach to Illumination     Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2005, Annual Conference Series     pp 1098-1107, July 2005, Los Angeles, CA      Project, Bibtex
	Bruce Walter, Sebastian Fernandez, Adam Arbree, Kavita Bala, Mike Donikian and Donald Greenberg.      Implementing Lightcuts     SIGGRAPH 2005 Technical Sketch     July 2005, Los Angeles, CA      Bibtex
	Miloŝ Haŝan, Fabio Pellacini, and Kavita Bala.      Real-time Hardware-accelerated Relighting with Approximate Indirect Illumination      Technical Report TR2005-1999,      Computer Science Department, July 2005
	Adam Arbree, Bruce Walter, and Kavita Bala.      Pre-processing Environment Maps for Dynamic Hardware Shadows      Technical Report TR2005-1998,      Computer Science Department, July 2005
	Kavita Bala, and Bruce Walter.      Reusing Shading for Interactive Global Illumination      Course at Game Developers Conference 2004
	Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Kavita Bala, and Bruce Walter.      Feature-Based Textures     Proceedings of Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) 2004,      pp 265--274, June 2004, Norkoping, Sweden     Project, Bibtex
	Kavita Bala, Bruce Walter and Donald Greenberg.       Combining Edges and Points for Interactive High-Quality Rendering      Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2003, Annual Conference Series,      22(3): 631--640, July 2003, San Diego, CA      Bibtex
	Ryan Ismert, Kavita Bala, and Donald Greenberg.      Detail Synthesis for Image-Based Texturing     Interactive 3D Graphics (I3D),     pp 171--176, April 2003, Monterey, CA     Bibtex
	Ryan Ismert, Kavita Bala, and Donald Greenberg.       Detail Synthesis for Image-Based Texturing      Longer version of I3D paper with more details      Technical Report PCG-03-1,      Program of Computer Graphics, January 2003
	Phil Dutre, Kavita Bala, and Philippe Baekert.       Advanced Global Illumination Course      Course 2 at SIGGRAPH 2002
	Sebastian Fernandez, Kavita Bala, Donald Greenberg.      Local Illumination Environments for Direct Lighting Acceleration     Thirteenth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering,     pp 7--14, June 2002, Pisa, Italy.     Bibtex
	Kavita Bala, Bruce Walter and Donald Greenberg.       Combining Edges and Points for Interactive Anti-Aliased Rendering      Earlier version of SIGGRAPH 2003 paper      Technical Report PCG-02-3,      Program of Computer Graphics, January 2002
	Phil Dutre, Kavita Bala, and Philippe Baekert.       Advanced Global Illumination Course      Course 20 at SIGGRAPH 2001
	Randima Fernando, Sebastian Fernandez, Kavita Bala, and Donald Greenberg.      Adaptive Shadow Maps     Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2001, Annual Conference Series,     pp 387--390, August 2001, Los Angeles, CA     Bibtex
	Sebastian Fernadez, Kavita Bala, Moreno A. Piccolotto, and Donald Greenberg.       Interactive Direct Lighting in Dynamic Scenes     Cornell University PCG Technical Report PCG-00-02,     January, 2000.
	Moreno A. Piccolotto, Sebastian Fernandez, Kavita Bala, M. Malone, and Donald Greenberg.      A System for 3D Conceptual Modeling for Architectural Design     Cornell University PCG Technical Report PCG-00-03,     January, 2000.
	Kavita Bala, Julie Dorsey, and Seth Teller       Bounded-Error Interactive Ray Tracing.      MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Technical Report 748 (MIT-TR-748), March, 1998.      Color plates: Color Plate 1, and Color Plate 2.
	Kavita Bala, Julie Dorsey, and Seth Teller.      Radiance Interpolants for Accelerated Bounded-Error Ray Tracing.     ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 18, Number 3.     pp 213-256. August 1999. PS(compressed 4.4 MB, uncompressed 52 MB)     Bibtex
	Kavita Bala, Julie Dorsey, and Seth Teller.      Interactive Ray-Traced Scene Editing Using Ray Segment Trees     Tenth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering,     pp 31--44, June 1999, Granada, Spain.     Bibtex
	Seth Teller, Kavita Bala, and Julie Dorsey.      Conservative Radiance Interpolants for Ray Tracing.     Seventh Eurographics Workshop on Rendering,     pp 257-268, June, 1996, Porto, Portugal.     Color Plate     Bibtex
	Kavita Bala. Conservative Radiance Interpolants for Ray Tracing.  Proceedings of the 1996 MIT Workshop on Scalable Computing, August 1996.
	Krishna Bala, T. E. Stern, David Simchi-Levi and Kavita Bala.       Routing in Linear Lightwave Networks.      IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Volume 3, Number 4,      pp 459--469, 1995.
	Kavita Bala, Frans M. Kaashoek and William E. Weihl.       Software Prefetching and Caching for Translation Lookaside Buffers .      Proceedings of the First Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI),      pp 243--253, November 1994, Monterey, CA.
	Krishna Bala, T. E. Stern and Kavita Bala.       Algorithms for Routing in Linear Lightwave Networks.      Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of IEEE Infocom,      1991. Miami, Florida.
	Krishna Bala, T.E. Stern and Kavita Bala.       A Minimum Interference Routing Algorithm for a Linear Lightwave Network.      Proceedings of IEEE Globecom,      1991. Phoenix, Arizona.
	Kavita Bala. A Simulator for Linear Lightwave Networks.       Columbia University, CTR Technical Report, 1990.
Supervised PhD Theses
	Paul Upchurch. Data-Driven Material Recognition and Photorealistic Image Editing Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, July 2018.
	Scott Wehrwein. Light and Motion: Modeling and Visualizing how Scenes Change over Time, June 2018.
	Pramook Khungurn. Modeling and Rendering Appearance of Hair and Textile Fibers, May 2017.
	Sean Bell. Modeling visual appearance with real-world photographs, July 2016.
	Kevin Matzen. Computer vision for spatio-temporal analysis of internet photo collections , July 2016 (co-chaired with Noah Snavely).
	Kyle Wilson. Robustly Modeling the World from Photos, May 2016 (co-chaired with Noah Snavely).
	Ivaylo Boyadzhiev. Computational Lighting Design and Image Filtering for Material Enhancement, July 2015.
	Shuang Zhao. Modeling and Rendering Fabrics at Micron-Resolution, August 2014.
	Daniel Cabrini Hauagge. Vision Under Changing Scene Appearance: Describing the World through Light and Symmetries, August 2014 (co-chaired with Noah Snavely).
	Adam Arbree. Scalable And Heterogeneous Rendering Of Subsurface Scattering Materials, August 2009.
	Miloŝ Haŝan. Matrix Sampling for Global Illumination, August 2009.
	Ganesh Ramanarayanan. Visual Equivalence: A New Standard of Image Fidelity for Computer Graphics, August 2008.
Theses
	Kavita Bala     Radiance Interpolants for Interactive Scene Editing and Ray Tracing      Doctorate, EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Tehcnology (MIT)      MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Technical Report 791 (MIT-LCS-TR-791),      September, 1999.
	Master of Science, EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).      Software Prefetching and Caching for Translation Lookaside Buffers .     1995.
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.

Kavita Bala's Projects Perception of Complex Scenes Rendering and modeling complex scenes is challenging. Understanding and exploiting how humans perceive complex scenes is an important area in graphics. We have worked on multiple projects in this area. Understanding how we perceive complex geometric aggregates is an open problem. We study the perception of aggregates to derive metrics for scene simplification (SIG '08) (Project). Standard image fidelity qualities are limiting and do not necessarily capture what is visually important to a graphics practitioner. Visual Equivalence (SIG '07) aims at a new standard of image fidelity that captures what is important in preserving the appearance of objects in a scene (Project). Scalable high-complexity rendering Rendering high complexity scenes including complex illumination and rendering effects such as motion blur, participating media, global illumination, and depth-of-field, is challenging. Multidimensional lightcuts (SIG '06) and lightcuts (SIG '05) present a unified, scalable rendering framework to efficiently render complex scenes with such effects. By unifying complex illumination into one framework we achieve high scalability and accurate imagery. (Multidimensional Lightcuts Project, Subsurface Lightcuts Project, Lightcuts Project). Scalable previewing for cinematic rendering Previewing still images and animations of scenes with high geometric and illumination complexity, and arbitrary shading models, is useful for applications such as cinematic lighting design. Matrix row-column sampling (SIG '07) treats rendering as the evaluation of a very large matrix of pixel-light interactions; this matrix can be efficiently approximated by evaluating a very small set of pixels, and using them to cluster lights globally, for a fast approximation of the image (Project). Tensor clustering extends this idea to render animations including deforming characters. This work extends the row-column sampling approach to tensors, and introduces a clustering metric that minimizes temporal flicker (Project). Scene Editing and Cinematic Relighting Lighting designers and modelers need interactive feedback while designing scenes. Direct-to-indirect transfer (SIG '06), is an interactive relighting engine that uses GPUs to compute indirect illumination as a designer moves lights in a scene. Efficient precomputation and rendering enable high performance, while supporting arbitrary light shaders and high complexity scenes. (Project). When a user changes the scene (but not the lighting), rapidly identifying the parts of the radiance computation that are affected by user manipulation is difficult. 5D Ray Segment Trees (EGRW '99) efficiently identify affected radiance interpolants and incrementally ray trace images. (Project). Feature-Based Graphics The human visual system is sensitive to features such as silhouettes and shadows. Edge-and-point rendering (SIG '03) identifies visually important features (edges) and combines them with sparse, expensive shading samples to achieve interactive rendering with global illumination. This approach bridges the gap between expensive, high-quality rendering and fast, interactive display. Project, GPU implementation project (GI '06) Feature-based textures (EGSR '04) are a resolution-independent representation of textures that capture visually important features. FBT Project Detail Synthesis Detail synthesis (I3D '03) adds visually plausible detail to textures created by image-based modeling. This approach identifies areas of poor detail in extracted textures and automatically creates higher resolution detail for uniformly high-quality textures. Project Constrained Minimization Synthesis (TVCG '06) casts detail synthesis and image analogies as an energy minimization problem, and uses graph cut techniques to synthesize textures while satisfying constraints. Project Direct Illumination Adaptive shadow maps (SIG '01) address the fundamental problem of shadow map aliasing by adaptively changing shadow map resolution based on viewpoint. ASM Project Local illumination environments (EGSR '02) capture the part of the environment that influences shading at each part of a scene. This approach enables rendering with complex direct illumination including hundreds of lights. LIE Project Iterative adaptive sampling (TVCG '06) efficiently renders scenes with many lights by adapting the sampling distribution of the lights in a multipass algorithm.   Radiance Interpolants Expensive shading is often smooth and can be often interpolated from sparse samples. Radiance interpolants (TOG '99) are 4D radiance samples that are quadrilinearly interpolated to rapidly approximate radiance with bounded approximation error. Radiance interpolants capture object-space, ray-space, image-space and temporal coherence in the radiance function. Radiance interpolants Project Unpublished research 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. Complete List of Publications...

Kavita Bala's 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 the 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). As dean, Bala secured the naming gift for the Cornell Bowers College, led a significant expansion of faculty to support the college's rapid growth, and launched construction of a new 135,000-square-foot building designed to house robotics labs, experiential learning spaces, and faculty offices. Her leadership helped position the college as a national leader. As the lead dean of the Cornell AI Initiative, Bala advanced key academic programs, including the creation of new minors in AI and AI in Society, and helped establish the Schmidt AI in Science postdoctoral program at Cornell. She also co-led a university-wide task force that developed guidelines for the responsible use of generative AI in education and learning. Bala's research has made fundamental contributions to image understanding, including the recognition of materials, styles, and object attributes; the modeling of complex materials; and the use of crowdsourced training data. Her groundbreaking work on style recognition using deep learning led to her co-founding a successful visual search AI startup. In addition to numerous teaching awards, Bala is a recipient of the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award, and is a Fellow of the SIGGRAPH Academy. Bala received a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For more information see: Cornell's Provost, Cornell Provost's initiatives, National Academies New Heroes profile.