Brief Bio: I received a bachelor's degree in Physics from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi in 1997 and another one in Computation from the University of Oxford in 2000 on a Rhodes Scholarship. I then stayed on at Oxford on a University Scholarship and obtained a DPhil in Engineering in 2004. Before joining Microsoft Research I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at MSRI Berkeley. My research interests lie in the areas of machine learning and computer vision.

Research

I am interested in the following research areas

• Multiple Kernel Learning
• Transfer Learning
• Density Estimation
• Feature Extraction and Low Level Vision
• Reading Text in Images
• Texture Classification
• Aerial Image Analysis

If you would like to apply for an internship at Microsoft Research India then please e-mail me directly. This is better than applying online as it'll ensure that I notice, and go through, your application. However, I still might not be able to respond to each e-mail in person. Internships are open throughout the year and typically last between 3 to 6 months (though this is quite flexible).

Publications

• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. A statistical approach to material classification using image patch exemplars. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, to appear.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and D. Ray. Learning the discriminative power-invariance trade-off. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 2007.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format | Slides | www | Code | Caltech Challenge 2007



• M. Varma and R. Garg. Locally invariant fractal features for statistical texture classification. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 2007.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• N. Adabala and M. Varma and K. Toyama. Computer aided generation of stylized maps. Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 18(2):133--140, May 2007.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. A statistical approach to texture classification from single images. International Journal of Computer Vision: Special Issue on Texture Analysis and Synthesis, 62(1--2):61--81, April 2005.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Unifying statistical texture classification frameworks. Image and Vision Computing, 22(14):1175--1183, December 2004.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma. Statistical Approaches To Texture Classification. DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, October 2004.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format (~18 Mb)



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Estimating illumination direction from textured images. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Washington, DC, volume 1, pages 179--186, June 2004.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Texture classification: Are filter banks necessary? In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Madison, Wisconsin, volume 2, pages 691--698, June 2003.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Statistical approaches to material classification. In Proceedings of the Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, Ahmedabad, India, pages 167--172, December 2002.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Classifying materials from images: to cluster or not to cluster? In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Texture Analysis and Synthesis, Copenhagen, Denmark, pages 139--144, June 2002.
  Bibtex source | Abstract



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Classifying images of materials: Achieving viewpoint and illumination independence. In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Computer Vision, Copenhagen, Denmark, volume 3, pages 255--271. Springer-Verlag, May 2002.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and V. S. Varma. Computer simulation of evolution. In Proceedings of the GIREP-ICPE International Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia, pages 138--150, August 1996.
  Bibtex source