Computer scientist, entrepreneur and scholar Kavita Bala launched the spring lecture series hosted by the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.

Bala, who serves as dean of the Bowers College of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University, is an expert in computer vision and computer graphics. She co-founded GrokStyle, a visual recognition AI company, which drew IKEA as a client, and was acquired by Facebook in 2019.

On Feb. 28 in Davis Hall, she delivered a lecture titled “Visual Discovery and Understanding from Micron to Global Scale.”

In the talk, she described her research lab’s work on visual discovery and understanding, including models for realistic visual appearance, reconstruction of shape and materials, and world-scale visual discovery of patterns and trends across geography and time.

The lecture was the first of a series this semester, with additional events to be announced by the institute. The series works to bring some of the nation’s most prominent researchers and innovators from academia, government and industry to speak on topics of interest to the artificial intelligence, computational science and data science communities in Buffalo.

For additional information on the speaker series, visit the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science’s website.