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Kavita Bala
"I’m interested in getting images to the user as quickly as possible, and what makes that a challenge is that we are dealing with increasingly complex data sets," says Bala, whose work has applications in games, movies, and virtual and augmented reality. "In the past, people would render a small room with two chairs in it. Now we want to render whole buildings or whole forests. How do you deal with that kind of complexity? And how do you present it so the user can interact with the data? That is the challenge." After receiving a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, Bala came to the United States, earning her master’s and doctoral degrees from MIT and arriving at Cornell as a post-doc in 1999. Now an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, she has taught rendering to undergraduate and graduate students and has developed algorithms and compact data representations for interactively rendering complex scenes. "Graphics is just so fundamentally appealing, it’s very hard not to be drawn in,"says Bala, who enjoys spending her free time hiking through the gorges with her family. "It is an application domain where you can actually see the results of what you’re doing and get a fairly immediate response to your research. In the future, people are going to use graphics even more intensively in their interactions with computers. And to be a part of creating that technology is very exciting." |
As graphic rendering grows more advanced, Kavita Bala has decided to concentrate on two things that don’t usually go together: high quality and high performance.