Ritwik Gupta

Timeline

1. 2017

   Bachelor's degree at Pittsburgh

   He earns a B.S. at the University of Pittsburgh in 2017.

2. 2019

   The xBD damage dataset

   In 2019, he is first author of the CVPR workshop paper that presents xBD, a dataset for change detection and building damage assessment in humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery research. The arXiv version of November 2019 reports 850,736 building annotations across 45,362 km² of satellite imagery.

3. 2021

   A student climate-AI initiative

   As a first-year Ph.D. student at Berkeley, he tells fellow students Colorado Reed and Medhini Narasimhan that their climate-and-AI reading group should grow. It becomes the student-led Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Climate Initiative, backed by advisor Trevor Darrell, and by the fall of 2021 the three are setting up meetings with climate scientists across Berkeley departments.

4. February 2023

   xView2 after the earthquake

   In February 2023, he is the Defense Innovation Unit's principal AI scientist and a researcher at Berkeley, working with xView2, an open-source project that pairs machine learning with satellite imagery to assess damage after the Turkey-Syria earthquake. At least two ground teams of search and rescue personnel from the UN's International Search and Rescue Advisory Group use it in Adiyaman, Turkey.

5. 2023

   A NeurIPS outstanding paper

   In 2023, he is among the authors of ClimSim, a dataset built by a consortium of climate scientists and ML researchers for hybrid ML-physics climate emulation. The paper receives an Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2023.

6. 2024

   The xT large-image framework

   In 2024, he is first author of xT, a framework that lets vision transformers model images of upwards of 30,000 x 30,000 pixels end to end on contemporary GPUs. The paper, with coauthors including Jitendra Malik and Trevor Darrell, is accepted to ICML 2024.

7. 2025

   A Berkeley AI Research doctorate

   He completes his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 2025, co-advised in Berkeley AI Research by Trevor Darrell and Shankar Sastry. Before the doctorate, he led a research lab on AI for humanitarian assistance and disaster response at Carnegie Mellon University and investigated real-time machine learning for the Apple Vision Pro.

8. As of October 2026

   Assistant professor at Maryland

   He is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland with a joint appointment in its Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute, and his work covers computer vision for chaotic environments and the governance of dual-use AI in civil and defense contexts. Earlier, he served as technical director for autonomy at the Defense Innovation Unit. A Berkeley postdoc with Aditi Krishnapriyan, on AI for cryo-EM and machine-learning force fields, precedes the Maryland post.