AI, Philanthropy and Networking – IIITH alumnus Manohar Paluri’s Meta-verse of Influence

Mr. Manohar Paluri, Vice President at Meta (AI) and poster boy for computer vision in IIIT Hyderabad was recently honored with the Outstanding Alumni Service Award. It recognized his significant contribution in building the alumni fund mechanism and for his role in connecting successive batches of alumni and Institute incubated start-ups to the US entrepreneurial system and core technology.

The 2006 batch alum had a pretty unusual career path. After his B. Tech (Honors) from IIITH, he notched up valuable industry experience at renowned companies like Google, IBM Watson labs and Sarnoff Corporation (now SRI). He took time off to pursue research at Georgia Tech. before transitioning to Facebook in 2012. As Vice President at Meta (AI), he was one of the co-founders of Facebook AI Research (FAIR), directed by Dr. Yann LeCun. He currently leads the foundation model efforts specifically the Llama models and, in the past, helped build Facebook’s Image and Video understanding efforts.

“If I were to summarize what has kept me excited to keep connecting back to CVIT, I’d say that IIITH is the first entity in my life which asked me questions about what I wanted to become, rather than telling me what success is and what I should do. The first year was formative and taught me to compete in that melting pot of diversity where everybody around you is smart, hardworking and top of their game. The university also sets high standards for you. The second year asked questions of what I wanted to learn and the final years taught me that the onus for defining success was within me”.

IIITH campus- Paluri’s Recharge zone
”Several core tenets and values learnt at IIITH were instrumental for future successes in my career. It’s innovation in research, working hard and when needed long hours, building social relationships, the purity of learning and not asking how it will be useful were some of them”, says Paluri. “I make it a point to visit the campus regularly, for workshops at summer school or to give talks about the latest and greatest in CV and AI, domains where the Institute shines the most, and where I learnt my basics”.

Being in an influential management role at Meta, one of the key requirements is to hire top talent in the AI and CV domain. Over the past decade, Paluri has placed over 20 IIITians, guided alumni on university and course selection, connected students to professors in different universities, and helped with internships at Meta and other organizations.

Last year, while interacting with Prof. PJ Narayanan (PJN) and the Alumni Affairs committee, it dawned on him that financial contributions towards resource building for the Institute was a key area that he could contribute. “Prof. PJN told me about their ambitious Education Block that will require a significant outlay over the next few years.  Our Paluri Foundation has pledged 1 crore rupees over the next five years”, observes the alum who, along with his wife Ashwini Gadekarla runs Paluri Foundation, a philanthropy organisation. He helped set up the mechanism for match-funding programs with compliant technological companies, that doubled the donations received from this channel.

Paluri Foundation and Mission Pay Back
Established in 2020 when the world was in the throes of the pandemic, the Foundation’s underlying philosophy was to give mindful citizens a platform to extend financial support or personal time, at a time when everyone was stuck at home.  “When the world was struggling and adapting, Ashwini and I realized how fortunate we were, in having a stable life and good health. Life is unpredictable and while you can focus on your family first and then look at helping society, for some there might never be a later”, he muses.

The foundation’s mission of partnering with the brightest minds on the hardest social problems, to create equal opportunity would lead to the foundation pledging support to noteworthy initiatives like Pratham, Nudge and donations to the IIITH Alumni fund. ”We started partnering with institutions and initiatives that resonated for us”. Coming from families that were not affluent, they recalled the sacrifices made by their parents to give them the best educational opportunities. “Our first initiative was in the education sector, partnering with Pratham. We were fortunate to have the guidance of mentors like Srinivas Narayanan and Ari Daman, who connected us to The Nudge institute, that was working on eradicating poverty”.

Pratham and Nudge used technology to change lives and focused on hard problems that would require innovative solutions. Fortuitously at that juncture, the AI revolution had taken the world by storm, and it became abundantly clear that investment in research and innovation would incur exponential returns. “That is how we reached out to IIITH, the Institute that had got me into AI and Research and offered them a substantial grant for infrastructure and research. Our support to this bastion of excellence continues and we have ambitious goals to expand into more partnerships and investment opportunities”. Last year Ashwini became a member of the SF Bay area for Pratham, and hosted an event for Nudge in Meta that brought in more supporters for Nudge. “Paluri Foundation is our avenue to pour our energy towards better outcomes for more people” observes the philanthropist.

A lifetime of friendship and service
“Every time Prof. PJ Narayanan visits the Bay Area, he pings a bunch of us and we have had the most gratifying meetups of 100+ folk”, says Paluri who uses WhatsApp and Facebook to network for these recharging moments. “I enjoy organizing workshops in AI and computer vision and make it a point to attend conferences especially CVPR, where I am the Area Chair. Around 40 alumni including batch mates, obviously in different cadences, live within a 30-mile radius.  Three of us live close by and meet every month, which is amazing because as you grow in age, you realize that these long lasting friendships are very valuable and that’s the social capital that the Institute built”, he mulls.

“It’s extremely clear now that in AI and other domains in research and technology, IIITH is a star in producing some of the best students, because of the work we do as researchers”, explains Paluri. “I, for instance, have more than 20,000 citations and there are multiple IIIT alumni with more than 10,000 citations in AI. If you look at augmented reality, one of the future bets in the world; Egocentric vision is one area with only 12 universities in the world, participating in that program. I have ensured that IIITH is one of them, working globally in Ego 4D”.

Paluri shares three key takeaways from his student days.  Prof. CV Jawahar was the embodiment of hard work. From Prof. PJN he learnt that to be successful in life, you have to be able to articulate your ideas and tell a story.  Prof. Prasad Jayanti, a visiting faculty was the embodiment of simplifying things while working on complicated domains.

“When you just go with the flow, you realize that the connections you make are valuable in shaping you, not in the present, but in the future, and that’s something that you rarely find in a university curriculum”.

Deepa Shailendra

Deepa Shailendra is a freelance writer for interior design publications; an irreverent blogger, consultant editor and author of two coffee table books. A social entrepreneur who believes that we are the harbingers of the transformation and can bring the change to better our world.