Kavita Bala, computer scientist, entrepreneur, and professor, became the 17th provost of Cornell University on January 1, 2025.
In fall 2025, Provost Bala launched the Committee on the Future of the American University to explore the disruptors facing higher education, including the loss of public trust in universities, the reshaping of university-government relations, and rapid technological change including the emergence of artificial intelligence. The committee aims to envision Cornell’s next fifty years as the university advances its core missions of education, research and scholarship, public impact, and community engagement.
Bala leads the Cornell AI Initiative, launched in 2021 during her term as the inaugural dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Drawing on Cornell’s broad expertise to support multidisciplinary research, policy developments, education, and innovation in artificial intelligence across campuses, the initiative positions the university as a global leader guiding AI’s responsible and transformative impact in areas such as computing, cognitive science, robotics, agriculture, and law. During her time as lead dean on the initiative, Bala established university-wide minors in AI and AI in Society, and she was co-chair of a cross-campus task force convened to develop guidelines for generative AI usage in Cornell classes.
Bala launched the Cornell Future of American Agriculture Initiative in 2026 to fund Cornell research with the most promise for practical, tangible, and applied benefits for farmers across New York and beyond, harnessing science and technology to advance American agriculture and the U.S. economy.
With President Kotlikoff, Provost Bala established the Presidential Task Force on Institutional Voice and the Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault. The Task Force on Institutional Voice offers recommendations on how and when university leadership should issue statements around politics, ideology, current affairs, and world events, and how members of our community can help guide these collective decisions. The Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault identifies strategies to target social conditions that enable assault and to foster a sexually safe and healthy campus, rooted in a framework that addresses individual behavior, community culture, and institutional accountability.
Bala previously served as the inaugural dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, for which she helped to secure the naming gift, after being named dean of the Faculty for Computing and Information Science in 2020. In her role as dean, Bala led the school through a time of rapid growth to meet student demand and to fulfill the school’s mission to benefit society. Under her leadership, Cornell Bowers CIS significantly expanded its faculty in a highly competitive market and built a new 135,000-square-foot facility, with space for new labs, experiential student learning, and continued faculty growth. She also established the Bowers CIS Undergraduate Research Experience (BURE) program to expand access to summer undergraduate research opportunities. Through her leadership, Bowers CIS became a degree-granting college in December 2025. Prior to her dean appointment, Bala was chair of Cornell’s Department of Computer Science.
Prior to her dean appointment, Bala was chair of Cornell’s Department of Computer Science. As chair, Bala expanded the department’s presence in robotics and artificial intelligence, and she increased opportunities for undergraduate research and entrepreneurship and support for a diverse community of students and faculty.
Bala’s research expertise is in computer vision, artificial intelligence, and computer graphics, and she has made fundamental contributions to these fields, including the recognition of materials, styles, and other object attributes in images, as well as the modeling of complex materials. Her work using crowdsourced training data has been influential; she pioneered work on style recognition using deep learning — technology that powered a successful visual search AI startup that Bala co-founded.
In recognition of her fundamental contributions to computer science and leadership in AI, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2025). In addition to numerous teaching awards, she received the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (2020) and the IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award (2021). She is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow (2019) and a Fellow of the SIGGRAPH Academy (2020).
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.
