Faculty
Utkarsh Ojha
Assistant Professor
ENB 329
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Biography
Utkarsh Ojha is an assistant professor in the USF Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing. He joined the college in 2025 and teaches an undergraduate course in computer vision, exploring how machines interpret and understand visual information. Before joining USF, Ojha completed a postdoctoral appointment at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, where he contributed to research in vision and generative AI. He gained industry experience through internships at Adobe Research.
Research Interests
Ojha鈥檚 research focuses on generative models for vision, a branch of artificial intelligence that trains algorithms to create synthetic data, such as realistic images, based on patterns in real-world datasets. He is especially interested in how the widespread use of machine-generated data could impact the performance, reliability, and ethical dimensions of future AI systems.
His work investigates the fundamental differences between AI-generated and human-generated content and explores the implications of increasingly blurred boundaries between them. More specifically, much of his past work has focused on detecting whether an image is real or fake. At USF, Ojha plans to continue studying these issues through a philosophical and technical lens, developing methods to better detect and distinguish synthetic content. He also plans to examine how AI systems can degrade when trained on data produced by other AI systems. He is particularly motivated to show that, even at a mathematical level, real and synthetic data differ in meaningful ways, and that those differences matter.
Education
Ojha earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, in Madison, WI. He has a Bachelor of Technology 鈥� Computer Science from Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology in Allahabad, India.