Jitendra Malik
Jitendra Malik is an Indian-born computer scientist and the Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, known for computer vision work including anisotropic diffusion, normalized cuts, high dynamic range imaging and R-CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry. He previously led research at MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry’s FAIR and is also a vice president at Amazon FAR.
Contents20 sections
Key facts
1960Born in Mathura, India
Malik was born in Mathura, India, in 1960.[1]
In school he was one of the top ten students in the Indian School Certificate Exam.[2]
1980Graduates from IIT Kanpur
In 1980 he graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur with a B.Tech. in electrical engineering, receiving the department’s Gold Medal for academic excellence.[3]
1985Earns PhD from Stanford University
In 1985 he received a PhD in computer science from Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry and then joined the UC Berkeley faculty.[4]
January 1986Joins UC Berkeley
In January 1986 he joined the University of California, Berkeley, teaching in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences while also on the faculty of Bioengineering and the Cognitive Science and Vision Science groups.[1]
July 1990Publishes Anisotropic Diffusion
In July 1990 he and Pietro Perona, both then at UC Berkeley, published “Scale-space and edge detection using anisotropic diffusion” in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, volume 12, issue 7.[5]
1997Co-authors High Dynamic Range Imaging Paper
In a SIGGRAPH 1997 technical paper, he and Paul E. Debevec presented a method for recovering high dynamic range radiance maps from ordinary photographs: taking several exposures of a scene, recovering the imaging response function and fusing the photographs into a single high dynamic range radiance map.[6]
August 2000Publishes Normalized Cuts
In August 2000 he and Jianbo Shi published “Normalized Cuts and Image Segmentation” in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, volume 22, issue 8, proposing a perceptual grouping approach that extracts the global impression of an image rather than relying on local features.[7]
2002–2006Leads the Computer Science Division and EECS
From 2002 he chaired UC Berkeley’s Computer Science Division, and he chaired the Department of EECS in 2004–2006 and again in 2016–2017.[8]
February 2011Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
On February 8, 2011, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to computer vision and image analysis.[9]
2014Co-authors R-CNN
In 2014 he, Ross Girshick, Jeff Donahue and Trevor Darrell published at CVPR the R-CNN (Regions with CNN features) object detection method, which applies convolutional neural networks to bottom-up region proposals and improved mean average precision on PASCAL VOC 2012 by more than 30% relative to the previous best, to 53.3%.[10]
April 2015Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
On April 28, 2015, he, then the Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of five new UC Berkeley members that year.[11]
May 2017Receives the ACM–AAAI Allen Newell Award
In May 2017 he was named recipient of the ACMAustralian Community MediaAustralian Community Media (ACM) is an Australian regional and rural news publishing group with more than 100 brands, including The Canberra Times; in 2019 Nine sold it to a company controlled by interests associated with Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group.Open the full entry–AAAI Allen Newell Award, with the citation noting his work on image contours, image segmentation and shape representation, and his leadership in creating the Berkeley segmentation dataset, which uses human segmentations to evaluate algorithms.[12]
April 2018Wins the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence
In April 2018 he won the 2018 Award for Research Excellence from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization, given to a scientist whose research has been of consistently high quality throughout a career.[13]
July 2018Joins Facebook AI Research
In July 2018 Facebook announced that he had joined Facebook AI Research (FAIR) from UC Berkeley to lead FAIR in Menlo Park.[14]
He kept a part-time affiliation with UC Berkeley to advise students.[15]
April 2019Named Computer Pioneer Award Recipient
On April 2, 2019, the IEEE Computer Society named him recipient of its 2019 Computer Pioneer Award for his “leading role in developing Computer Vision into a thriving discipline through pioneering research, leadership, and mentorship.”[8]
July 21, 2020Appears on the Lex Fridman Podcast
On July 21, 2020, he appeared on episode 110 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing why computer vision is hard, Tesla Autopilot, benchmarks and active learning in vision, lessons from children, vision and language, and AGI.[16]
May 2026Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
In May 2026 the Royal Society elected him a Fellow, one of three new fellows from UC Berkeley that year.[17]
As of October 2026: Berkeley Professor and Amazon FAR Vice President
As of October 2026 he is the Arthur J. Chick Professor in Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and is on partial industrial leave as VP and Distinguished Scientist at the Amazon FAR lab. He has mentored more than 80 PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, and his publications have received thirteen best paper awards.[2]
Before Amazon he served as research scientist director and site lead at Facebook AI Research in Menlo Park, and later as VP of robotics research at FAIR, Meta.[3]
Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts
Personal website: Public link: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~malik/ (opens in a new window)[4]
UC Berkeley: Official website: https://www.berkeley.edu/ (opens in a new window)[4]
Sources
- Jitendra Malik | Research UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- Jitendra Malik biography (opens in a new window)
- Prof Jitendra Malik (opens in a new window)
- Jitendra Malik | EECS at UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- Scale-space and edge detection using anisotropic diffusion | CaltechAUTHORS (opens in a new window)
- “Recovering high dynamic range radiance maps from photographs” by Debevec and Malik – ACM SIGGRAPH HISTORY ARCHIVES (opens in a new window)
- Normalized Cuts and Image Segmentation (opens in a new window)
- Jitendra Malik Wins Computer Pioneer Award (opens in a new window)
- Three UC Berkeley faculty members elected to National Academy of Engineering - Berkeley News (opens in a new window)
- CVPR 2014 Open Access Repository (opens in a new window)
- Five Berkeley scientists named to National Academy - Berkeley News (opens in a new window)
- Jitendra Malik recipient of the ACM and AAAI Allen Newell Award - EECS at Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- Jitendra Malik wins IJCAI-18 Award for Research Excellence - EECS at Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- Facebook AI Research Expands With New Academic Collaborations (opens in a new window)
- Jitendra Malik takes position at Facebook - EECS at Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- #110 - Jitendra Malik: Computer Vision | Lex Fridman Podcast (opens in a new window)
- Three UC Berkeley Faculty Members Elected to UK’s Royal Society | Research UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)