Jitendra Malik was born on October 11, 1960. He is an Indian-American professor who works at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research in computer vision.
Academic biography
Malik was born in Mathura, India, on October 11, 1960. He attended school in Jabalpur at St. Aloysius Senior Secondary School. He earned a BTech degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1980 and a PhD degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1985. In January 1986, he began working at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is now the Arthur J. Chick Professor in the Computer Science Division of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS). He also teaches in the Bioengineering department and participates in groups focused on Cognitive Science and Vision Science. He led the Computer Science Division from 2002 to 2004 and served as the head of the EECS department from 2004 to 2006 and again from 2016 to 2017. Since January 2018, he has been the research director and site leader of Facebook AI Research in Menlo Park, where he guides teams working on computer vision, machine learning, and robotics.
Research
Malik's research group has studied many areas, including computer vision, how humans see using computers, computer graphics, and analyzing images from living things. He has guided more than 60 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, many of whom now teach at major universities in the United States, such as MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, Caltech, Cornell, UIUC, U. Penn, and U. Michigan, as well as universities around the world. Some important ideas and methods developed from his work include anisotropic diffusion, normalized cuts, high dynamic range imaging, shape context, and R-CNN. According to Google Scholar, his research has been cited more than 150,000 times. His h-index is 124, his i10-index is 278, and more than 20 of his papers have been cited over 1,000 times each. He is listed as one of ISI's Highly Cited Researchers in engineering. He has been a member of the jury for the Engineering and Computer Science category of the Infosys Prize since 2019.
He earned the gold medal for being the top graduate in electrical engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1980 and received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989. At UC Berkeley, he was honored with the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000, named a Miller Research Professor in 2001, and became the Arthur J. Chick Professor in 2002. He was given the Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIT Kanpur in 2008. He won the Longuet-Higgins Prize in 2007 and 2008 and the Helmholtz Prize twice in 2015 for work that has remained influential over time (awarded to papers published more than 10 years ago). He is a member of the IEEE, ACM, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and National Academy of Sciences. He has also received the PAMI-TC Distinguished Researcher Award (2013), the K.S. Fu Prize (2014), the ACM-AAAAI Allen Newell Award (2016), the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in AI (2018), and the 2019 IEEE Computer Society's Computer Pioneer Award for his "leading role in developing Computer Vision into a thriving discipline through pioneering research, leadership, and mentorship."