Jitendra Malik is the Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley and a foundational figure in computer vision. Over a career spanning the pre-deep-learning and deep-learning eras, his group produced a string of widely used ideas, including anisotropic diffusion, normalized cuts for image segmentation, and shape contexts for object recognition.
Malik is also one of the field’s most influential mentors, having advised more than sixty Ph.D. students and postdocs who became leaders in their own right, among them Alexei Efros and Ross Girshick. He was a co-author of the 2013 R-CNN paper that brought convolutional networks to object detection, written with Girshick during the latter’s postdoc in his group. His honors include the 2016 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award and the 2019 IEEE Computer Pioneer Award.
In recent years Malik has served as a Vice President of robotics research at Meta’s FAIR lab while on partial leave from Berkeley, reflecting a late-career turn toward embodied AI and robotics, the problem of connecting perception to action in the physical world.