Her work was recognized in 2020 by the international Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Technique - ACM SIGGRAPH - for “fundamental contributions to physically-based and scalable rendering, material modeling, perception for graphics, and visual recognition.” Her early research focused on realistic, physically-based rendering and includes seminal work on scalable rendering, notably the development of Lightcuts and other approximate illumination algorithms, as well as contributions to volumetric and procedural modeling of textiles.
[7][8] GrokStyle, a visual recognition AI company, began as a vision search and shopping tool integrated with IKEA’s Augmented Reality application, and was subsequently acquired by Facebook in 2019.
[4] Bala served the research community in numerous important roles including Technical Papers Chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2011, and Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics from 2015 to 2018.
[13] This technology powered GrokStyle,[7] a successful visual search startup that Bala co-founded with Sean Bell.
Bala has also done notable recent work on worldwide analysis of fashion by analyzing image collections to uncover how cultural clothing trends vary around the world.