By Patricia Waldron
Bharath Hariharan, assistant professor of computer science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, received the 2022 Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Young Researcher Award. The honor is given annually in recognition of “a distinguished research contribution in computer vision” made by an early-career researcher.
The IEEE Computer Society announced Hariharan’s award June 21 at their Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
Also at CVPR, Dean Kavita Bala gave a featured keynote speech on June 23, entitled “Understanding Visual Appearance from Micron to Global Scale.” In her presentation, she described her group's research on better visual understanding. This work includes graphics models for realistic visual appearance and rendering, reconstruction of shape and materials, and visual search and recognition for world-scale discovery of visual patterns and trends across geography and time.
Hariharan’s work lies at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning. Currently, he is developing computer recognition systems capable of identifying specific objects and visual phenomena using a small number of training images and with very little or no supervision. Most traditional visual recognition systems require millions of carefully curated and annotated images to correctly identify visual concepts. Collecting these large training data sets can be challenging and expensive, which makes computer vision technology inaccessible for most applications. Ultimately, Hariharan seeks to make this technology available to all users by requiring minimal training data.
In March of this year, Hariharan also received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Award.
Patricia Waldron is a science writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.