News April 2022

MESSAGE FROM DEAN BALA

Dear Bowers CIS community,  The end of the 2021-2022 academic year is just around the corner, and soon we will be celebrating our graduates during commencement and department recognition events. I am delighted to share the news that for the first time our graduates and faculty will walk together into Schoellkopf Field behind the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science banner! This is an exciting milestone for the college, and I look forward to celebrating this historic moment with our graduates, their families, and the broader Cornell community. On Friday, May 27, Bowers CIS will host three recognition ceremonies (one for each department) in Barton Hall – you can learn more via this commencement website. I hope you will join us for this exciting time of celebration and reflection. Best, Kavita Bala Dean, Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science  dean@cis.cornell.edu

AROUND THE COLLEGE

Help us welcome:

Renee Milligan, Assistant Director of the Computer Science Master of Engineering program 

ACCOLADES

Éva Tardos named ACM Athena Lecturer for Impactful Mentoring and Significant Contributions to Theoretical Computer Science The Association for Computing Machinery has named Éva Tardos the 2022-2023 ACM Athena Lecturer. Tardos is recognized for her fundamental research contributions to combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, and algorithmic game theory, and for her dedicated mentoring and service to these communities.

Jon Kleinberg to advise the President of the United States on Artificial Intelligence Jon Kleinberg has been appointed by the U.S. Department of Commerce to serve on a newly established committee that will advise the U.S. president on issues related to artificial intelligence.  Kleinberg is one of 27 expert leaders who were nominated by the public to serve on the National AI Advisory Committee, which was launched this year to provide recommendations on topics including U.S. AI competitiveness, the state of science around AI, and AI workforce issues.

Choudhury elected to SIGCHI Academy Tanzeem Choudhury has been named a 2022 inductee of the SIGCHI Academy. Choudhury is the senior vice president of digital health at Optum Labs, and is a co-founder of HealthRhythms, Inc., a company whose mission is to add a layer of behavioral health into all of healthcare.

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

Abe Davis and Noah Snavely part of team receiving $1M USDA grant to support digital agriculture integration  Kevin Ellis and Adrian Sampson receive Google Research Scholar Awards

Big Red in the Big Easy: Cornell looms large at top HCI conference CHI – the premier annual conference for human computer interaction scholars – is back in a big way, returning with a hybrid in-person and virtual format beginning April 30 in New Orleans. This year, Cornell faculty and students will present 16 papers – including two Best Papers and two Honorable Mentions.

Genetics affects functions of gut microbiome New research from Martin Wells is exploring how human genetics impacts functions of the gut microbiome.

Alexandra Silva delivers keynote at European Joint Conference on Theory & Practice of Software

Technology for whom? Nicola Dell believes computer technology can serve vulnerable and marginalized users. The key is researchers and designers who listen and engage.

STUDENT & ALUMNI NEWS

Computer Science Research Night orients students to the field and its many opportunities The aim of Computer Science Research Night — hosted by ACSU — is to provide a venue for undergraduates interested in research to connect with and learn first-hand from faculty and Ph.D. researchers.  More than 100 Cornell undergraduates attended the Spring 2022 event, which included a Q&A with a panel of undergraduates discussing their experience in research. Panelists fielded questions about how they chose their research area, how they find research, and ways they balance research and coursework. A poster session led by current Computer Science Ph.D. students followed.

Office of DEI sponsors trip to Greek Peak In March, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion held its inaugural ski expedition for students, faculty, and staff. More than 50 students from a range of majors joined the outing and had the chance to tube with Office of DEI staff, ski with Bowers CIS faculty, and share lunch with their classmates.

Yanyi Liu named a 2022 J. P. Morgan Ph.D. Fellow Yanyi Liu, a doctoral student in the field of computer science at Cornell Tech, has been named a 2022 J.P. Morgan Ph.D. Fellow. The fellowship is awarded to graduate students annually who have the skills and imagination to potentially transform the fields of artificial intelligence and data analytics in productive ways.

Three Info Sci students named 2022 Social Media Collective Interns Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective — a network of social science and humanistic researchers — has selected Margot Hanley, Emily Tseng, and Stephen Yang as interns.

MEDIA MENTIONS

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis: Social policy in the age of algorithms: An interview with Jon Kleinberg Jon Kleinberg discusses how technology can confront hidden bias and make smarter choices.

Gadget: Robot photographer uses AI to capture best shot AutoPhoto is believed to be the first robotic-photographer system using a “learned aesthetic” machine learning model and represents a major development in using autonomous agents to visually document a space. The system, developed by a team at Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Hadi AlZayer, Hubert Lin, and Dean Kavita Bala), can automatically roam an interior space and capture aesthetically pleasing photographs.

Quanta: Researchers Identify ‘Master Problem’ Underlying All Cryptography The existence of secure cryptography depends on one of the oldest questions in computational complexity explain Rafael Pass and Yanyi Liu.

Have something to share? Win an award? Publish a paper? Let us know. goodnews@cis.cornell.edu

cis.cornell.edu

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