Utkarsh Mall
Assistant Professor
Computer Vision, MBZUAI
B-1.37, 1B Building
MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE
utkarsh.mall@mbzuai.ac.ae
I am an assistant professor of Computer Vision at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi, UAE; starting Fall 2025. My research lies in computer vision and its application to science. Before joining MBZUAI, I was a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University, where I was advised by Carl Vondrick. Prior to Columbia, I completed my PhD at Cornell University co-advised by Kavita Bala and Bharath Hariharan in 2023. Prior to that, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where I worked with Siddhartha Chaudhuri in 2017. I was also fortunate to work with Kristen Grauman and Tamara Berg during a research internship at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) in 2020.
My research interests lie in computer vision and its applications. More specifically, I aim to build vision and AI tools that can help scientists and domain experts in accelerating discoveries. To achieve this, I work in three main directions:
- I aim to build recognition systems that can learn with little to no supervision. This work spans domains such as multimodal learning, self-supervised learning, and zero/few-shot learning.
- I aim to improve properties other than accuracy for these recognition systems, allowing them to be more trustworthy while being used by domain experts. This includes improving interpretability, uncertainty measures, and robustness via neurosymbolic learning.
- I aim to build tools for automatic discovery on top of these recognition systems.
- I have also applied my work to a range of application domains from fashion to public health to agriculture (via satellite images).
Here is a more in-depth look at my research: Research Statement
Note: If you are a student at MBZUAI interested in any of the aforementioned areas, feel free to reach out to me!
