Dhruv Batra is a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), and an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech.
From 2013-2016, he was an Assistant Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he lead the VT Machine Learning & Perception group and was a member of the Virginia Center for Autonomous Systems (VaCAS) and the VT Discovery Analytics Center (DAC). From 2010-2012, he was a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), a philanthropically endowed academic computer science institute located on the University of Chicago campus. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and 2010 respectively, advised by Tsuhan Chen.
He is a recipient of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award, the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award (2014), Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award (2014), Virginia Tech College of Engineering Outstanding New Assistant Professor award (2015), two Google Faculty Research Awards (2013, 2015), Amazon Academic Research award (2016), Carnegie Mellon Dean’s Fellowship (2007), and several teaching commendations at Virginia Tech. Research from his lab has been featured in Bloomberg Business, The Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, Newsweek, WVTF Radio IQ, and a number of popular press magazines and newspapers.
Interests
Machine learning, computer vision, and AI, with a focus on developing intelligent systems that are able to concisely summarize their beliefs about the world with diverse predictions, integrate information and beliefs across different sub-components or `modules' of AI (vision, language, reasoning) to extract a holistic view of the world, and explain why they believe what they believe.