Paola Cascante-Bonilla
Paola Cascante-Bonilla
Assistant Professor (Joining in Fall 2025)

Department of Computer Science

Email
pcb [at] umiacs.umd.edu
Interests
Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Embodied AI, and Machine Learning
Biography

Paola Cascante-Bonilla received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Rice University in 2024, her Master of Computer Science at the University of Virginia in 2021, and a B.S. in Engineering at the Tecnológico de Costa Rica in 2018. Before joining the computer science department at Stony Brook, Dr. Cascante-Bonilla is working as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

Research

Paola's research focuses on developing systems capable of compositional reasoning and common-sense inference, using vision and language, while addressing problems regarding cultural biases, data distribution, explainability, and trustworthy AI. Her work also focuses on developing simulated environments to provide a safe, controlled setting where embodied agents can learn. Her aim is to create virtual environments and synthetic agents that can effectively collaborate and solve complex tasks by leveraging the implicit knowledge of large-scale pre-trained deep learning models.