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Jitendra Malik

Arthur J. Chick Professor of EECS, UC Berkeley

Jitendra Malik is the Arthur J. Chick Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, where Malik joined the faculty in 1986, and is currently on partial industrial leave as VP and Distinguished Scientist at the Amazon FAR lab. Malik's research group works on computer vision, robotics, and machine learning, and Malik's biography names normalized cuts, shape contexts, and R-CNN among the concepts and algorithms that came from this research. Malik is a co-author of the 2013 R-CNN paper and of SlowFast Networks for video recognition. Malik's homepage lists recent teaching of CS 280 Computer Vision (Spring 2025) and CS 294-277 Robots That Learn (Spring 2026).1234

At a glance

Current roles
Arthur J. Chick Professor of EECS +1 more
Sector
University
Education
Stanford, UC Berkeley
Work listed
2
Honors
12
Sources cited
5
Profile reviewed

Career

Malik joined the Berkeley EECS faculty in January 1986, becoming a full professor in 1996 and holding the Arthur J. Chick professorship since 2002. At Berkeley, Malik chaired the Computer Science Division from 2002 to 2004 and the EECS department in 2004–2006 and again in 2016–2017, and also holds an appointment in Bioengineering.52

Malik has also held industry research roles alongside the Berkeley appointment: visiting scientific director of Yahoo! Research Berkeley in 2007, visiting research scientist at Google in 2015–2016, and a series of positions at Facebook AI Research and Meta from 2018 to 2025, ending as VP of Robotics Research. Since 2026 Malik has been VP and Distinguished Scientist at Amazon's FAR lab while on partial leave from Berkeley.52

Research

Malik's group works on computer vision, robotics and machine learning, and has also contributed to computational models of human vision, computer graphics and biological image analysis. Early papers include anisotropic diffusion for edge detection with Pietro Perona (1987–1990), normalized cuts for image segmentation with Jianbo Shi (1997–2000), recovering high-dynamic-range radiance maps from photographs with Paul Debevec (SIGGRAPH 1997), and shape contexts for shape matching with Serge Belongie.25

In 2013 Malik co-authored R-CNN with Ross Girshick, Jeff Donahue and Trevor Darrell, which combined region proposals with convolutional network features for object detection, and in 2018 co-authored SlowFast networks for video recognition. Malik's recent teaching includes CS 280 Computer Vision in spring 2025 and, on learning-based robotics, CS 294-277 Robots That Learn in spring 2026.341

Work and contributions

  • R-CNN Published research

    Co-author, with Ross Girshick, Jeff Donahue, and Trevor Darrell, of "Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation" (2013), the R-CNN paper.32

  • SlowFast Networks Published research

    Co-author of "SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition" (2018) with Christoph Feichtenhofer, Haoqi Fan, and Kaiming He.4

Timeline

  1. Joined the UC Berkeley EECS faculty as an assistant professor.52
  2. Became a full professor of EECS at UC Berkeley.5
  3. Presented "Normalized Cuts and Image Segmentation" with Jianbo Shi at CVPR.5
  4. Named Arthur J. Chick Professor and began a term as chair of Berkeley's Computer Science Division.5
  5. Began a term as chair of the Berkeley EECS department, serving until 2006.5
  6. Co-authored the R-CNN object detection paper.3
  7. Became Research Scientist Director and Site Lead at Facebook AI Research.5
  8. Co-authored "SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition".4
  9. Served as VP of Robotics Research at FAIR, Meta.5
  10. Became VP and Distinguished Scientist at Amazon's FAR lab.52

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

  • Research Scientist Director and Site Lead (2018–2019), Research Scientist Director (part-time, 2020–2024), VP of Robotics Research (2025), Meta (FAIR)5
  • Visiting Research Scientist (2015–2016), Google5

Honors and recognition

  • Fellow of the Royal Society · Royal Society, 202652
  • Computer Pioneer Award · IEEE Computer Society, 201952
  • IJCAI Award for Research Excellence · International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, 201852
  • ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award · ACM and AAAI, 201652
  • Member, National Academy of Sciences · National Academy of Sciences, 20155
  • King-Sun Fu Prize · International Association for Pattern Recognition, 201452
  • Distinguished Researcher in Computer Vision · IEEE PAMI Technical Committee, 201352
  • Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences · American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 20135
  • Member, National Academy of Engineering · National Academy of Engineering, 20115
  • ACM Fellow · Association for Computing Machinery, 20085
  • IEEE Fellow · IEEE, 20055
  • Presidential Young Investigator Award · National Science Foundation, 198952

Where they work

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References

5 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026

  1. Jitendra Malik — homepage (UC Berkeley EECS)Jitendra Malik · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. Jitendra Malik — brief bioJitendra Malik · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation (arXiv 1311.2524)arXiv · Paper · published Nov 11, 2013 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  4. SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition (arXiv 1812.03982)arXiv · Paper · published Dec 10, 2018 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  5. Curriculum Vitae — Jitendra MalikUC Berkeley EECS · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026