Kavita Bala

Kavita Bala (born 1971) is an Indian-American computer scientist, and the 17th and current provost of Cornell University. She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell. 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.

Bala's primary research focus is on computer vision and graphics. Her work was recognized in 2020 by the special interest group on computer graphics, 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.