R. Manmatha

R. Manmatha is an Adjunct Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Principal Scientist at Amazon A9 since 2013. His academic journey includes a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst (1997), an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Hawaii (1986), and a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (1983).

Research Interests

Manmatha's work spans Computer Vision, Information Retrieval, and Document Analysis. Key projects include:

• Developing Vision-Language Models for GUI grounding and OCR-free document understanding
• Creating Word Spotting techniques for historical manuscripts like George Washington's papers
• Advancing Image Retrieval through statistical and relevance models
• Building Meta Search systems using score distribution analysis
• Optimizing Diffusion Transformers for text-to-image generation

Scientific Contributions

His research has led to numerous publications in conferences like SIGIR, CVPR, and ICDAR, focusing on:

• Automatic Image Annotation using cross-media relevance models
• Scale Space Techniques for handwritten manuscript segmentation
• Alignment Methods for document-groundtruth generation
• Indian Language Document Search via locality-sensitive hashing
• Transformer-based architectures for multimodal and document tasks

Advising & Collaborations

Manmatha has mentored students including Jiwoon Jeon, Shaolei Feng, Toni Rath, Jamie Rothfeder, and Nitin Srimal. He co-founded Snaptell (acquired by Amazon) and contributed to Amazon's mobile search technology.

Labs & Teams

He leads the Multi-media Indexing and Retrieval (MIR) group at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), focusing on non-textual information indexing through ASCII conversion and direct content analysis.