Second place and $1,000 was awarded to information science doctoral student Sterling Williams-Ceci for her presentation, “AI Helps us Write – but at What Cost?”

“The science of science” is a quizzical, albeit accurate, description of Yian Yin’s research.

An assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Yin uses mathematical and computational methods to mine data and examine the factors that help (or hinder) scientific research and innovation.

“Science, technology, and innovation are the ultimate drivers of economic growth, but despite centuries of research on all kinds of things, it is indeed intriguing that we haven't really looked into the development of science in a scientific way,” Yin said.

Yin approaches the science of science as an interdisciplinary researcher in an interdisciplinary field – he’s a computational social scientist, a network scientist, an industrial engineer, and applied mathematician.

And he is a recent addition to the Forbes 30 under 30 Science list.

Here are some examples of Yin’s work: He has measured the usefulness of public funds that support scientific research; explored the co-evolution of policy and science, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a guide, and studied the dynamics of failure to better understand success.

These same methods used to study the science of science, he said, also provide a unique lens to examine broader issues like climate change, fake news, privacy, and security.

Then, there are other research initiatives that, Yin jokes, have partly self-serving ends. Through quantitative analysis, he is challenging some of the assumptions about career success among scientists.

“I want to become a great scientist, so I want to understand, what are the patterns of a successful scientific career? When do people make their best work? How do scientific ideas spread within and across a scientific community?” Yin said. “These are valid research questions, but they’re also questions I’m generally interested in.”

Take, for instance, his analysis of the career histories of nearly 550 Nobel Prize recipients. Did their career arcs differ from the majority of scientists’? No, Yin found.

“They share many career patterns that are similar to us, which I interpret as an encouraging signal,” he said.

His research has been covered in publications like Forbes, Scientific American, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, and MIT Technology Review.

This past fall was Yin’s first official semester as a Cornell professor. He co-teaches “Networks,” an interdisciplinary course cross-listed in four departments that draws students from across diverse fields.

“This is a very big class” – more than 400 students – “and some people may see the class as challenging,” he said. “But talking about things I'm really excited about to hundreds of people three times a week, I actually see it as a privilege. I love the interactions.”

Leading Cornell’s Networks course has significant meaning to Yin. He was an undergraduate studying statistics and economics at Peking University in China when, less than enthused with the prospects of a career in abstract mathematical theory, he randomly attended a seminar led by a network scientist. The lecturer explained that patterns of human communication and connection could be found when turning mathematical and computational processes loose on messy data. That day, Yin became a network scientist. He pored over the seminal book on networks – “Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World,” written by Cornell professors David Easley and Jon Kleinberg. Today, Yin co-teaches that same course with Easley, using the original duo’s pioneering text.

“It’s a kind of cycle for me – I learned from these two scientists, and I’m now teaching the Networks class they led and paying it back to a broad community,” he said. “It’s an honor.” Looking ahead, Yin is most excited about collaborating with researchers in Cornell Bowers CIS and across the university. “This is the campus I want to be on,” he said. “As a network scientist and a science-of-science researcher, I feel Cornell is not one of, it is the campus where I want to be.”

Louis DiPietro is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Thorsten Joachims and Andrew Myers, two faculty members from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, have each received prestigious named professorships in honor of past university luminaries.

Jacob Gould Schurman Professor

Joachims, professor of computer science and information science and Cornell Bowers CIS’s inaugural associate dean for research, has been named Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of computer science and information science, the sixth current Cornell faculty member to share the professorship named for the university’s third president. Joachims joins Éva Tardos, chair of computer science, as the second Jacob Gould Schurman Professor within Cornell Bowers CIS. 

Joachims is a leading figure in artificial intelligence, particularly in the fields of machine learning and data mining. His research focuses on machine learning methods that enable intelligent systems to learn from their human users in applications ranging from search and recommendation systems to large language models. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence as well as the Association for Computing Machinery, and was selected as an inaugural member of the latter’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval Academy in 2021. Joachims also received the Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Innovation Award in 2020. He has served previously as an action editor for both the Machine Learning Journal and the Journal of Machine Learning Research. Joachims received his Diplom and Ph.D. in computer science from the Universitat Dortmund, Germany, in 1997 and 2001, respectively. He joined Cornell Bowers CIS in 2001.

The Jacob Gould Schurman Professorship of German Literature was established in 1967 by a gift from Jacob Gould Schurman III, who came to Cornell in 1886 as the first Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy. Four years later, he was named the first dean of the Sage School of Philosophy, and in 1892, became the third president of Cornell University. He served as president for 28 years, the longest presidency at the university to date, and in retirement, was the minister to China and then the ambassador to Germany. He passed away in 1942.

Class of 1912 Professor of Engineering

Myers, professor of computer science, has been named the Class of 1912 Professor of Engineering. He joins James Renegar of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering as the university’s two current Class of 1912 Professors of Engineering.

A leader in computer security, Myers focuses on practical, sound, expressive languages and systems for enforcing information security. He is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) fellow, a recipient of both an Alfred P. Sloan Research fellowship and National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, and his research has received numerous other awards and honors. Myers is past editor-in-chief for ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) and past co-editor-in-chief for the Journal of Computer Security. He is a member of the scientific advisory board for Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI/SWS). Myers received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1999. He joined Cornell Bowers CIS in 1999.

In 1963, shortly after its 50-year reunion, the Cornell class of 1912 raised funds and made an unrestricted gift, combining it with a gift from the Ford Foundation to establish the Class of 1912 Professor of Engineering. Floyd R. Newman, a member of the 1912 class and the Cornell Hall of Fame, was a driving force in establishing the professorship, working with classmates Frederick W. Krebs, class vice president, and Charles C. Colman, class representative, to help raise funds. In a letter to the class following the professorship’s creation, the trio commended classmates’ generosity and for seizing “the opportunity to express your gratitude to Cornell in such a way that Cornell will continue to perform as a great educational center.”

By Louis DiPietro, a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

The Cornell Center for Social Sciences (CCSS) has awarded 11 fellowships to Cornell faculty. The 2024-2025 cohort, representing seven Cornell colleges, will use their semester in residence at CCSS to research topics such as the impact of government support on clean energy innovation, the effects of pay transparency laws and the development of scalable interventions that could reduce the harm caused by online misinformation.

Assistant professors Anna Y.Q. Ho, Chao-Ming Jian, Rene Kizilcec and Karan Mehta are among 126 early-career researchers who have won 2024 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Cornell has joined a U.S. Commerce Department initiative to support development and deployment of trustworthy and safe artificial intelligence technologies. Established by the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC) will bring together AI creators and users, academics, nonprofit organizations, and government and industry researchers.

Long before people worried about the effects of ChatGPT on personal communication and social norms, there was the autopen and its precursors – automatic signature machines – that some feared would be misused to forge signatures and sign war declarations and other bills.

At its best, teaching builds a sense of community among students and instructors in a class. But where do early-career instructors find community outside of the classroom?

That question was how the Belonging at Cornell Advanced Graduate Teaching Cohort (AGTC) was born. The brainchild of Kim Webb and Rink Tacoma-Fogal, both Center for Teaching Innovation Graduate Fellows, the cohort formed in Spring 2023, and was based on an identified need for developing teaching skills beyond the capabilities of a teaching orientation program.

Malte Jung, associate professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and the Nancy H. ’62 and Philip M. ’62 Young Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, along with two Cornell alumni, were awarded a six-figure seed grant from the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law and Society (TRAILS) to explore trust building in embodied artificial intelligence systems.

Announced last week, Jung, along with Huaishu Peng, Ph.D. ‘19, and Ge Gao, Ph.D. ‘17, who are both assistant professors at the University of Maryland, College Park, are among eight teams that will receive TRAILS grants ranging from $100,000 to $150,000 each. The grants are intended to fund research and innovation around TRAILS’ primary research areas: participatory design, methods and metrics, evaluating trust, and participatory governance. 

Jung, Peng, and Gao will explore miniaturized on-body or desktop robotic systems that can enable the exchange of nonverbal cues between blind and sighted people. They will also examine multiple factors – both physical and mental – to gain a deeper understanding of both groups’ values related to teamwork facilitated by embodied AI.

Both Peng and Gao have connections to Cornell Bowers CIS: Peng received his doctoral degree in information science, while Gao received her doctoral degree in communication with a minor in information science.

“We are extremely pleased with the first round of projects,” said Valerie Reyna, the Lois and Melvin Tukman Professor of Human Development in the College of Human Ecology and leader of Cornell’s contribution to TRAILS. “Drs. Peng, Gao and Jung’s project epitomizes the potential of values-driven AI to improve human lives, while building trust and accountability.”

TRAILS was launched last year with a $20 million award from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The Institute’s focus is on “transforming the practice of AI from one driven primarily by technological innovation to one that is driven by ethics, human rights, and input and feedback from communities whose voices have previously been marginalized,” according to the website. To help carry out this mission, the institute leverages academic talent from its four primary institutions – Cornell University, the University of Maryland, George Washington University, and Morgan State University.

Three faculty members in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science have been named 2023 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellows.

Phoebe Sengers, professor of information science and science and technology studies, Noah Snavely, professor of computer science at Cornell Tech, and Kilian Weinberger, professor of computer science, are among ACM’s 68 newest fellows, which were announced Jan. 24.  

Sengers was recognized for contributions to critically-informed human-computer interaction and design. A scholar in human computer interaction (HCI) and science and technology studies (STS), Sengers’ work integrates ethnographic and historical analysis of the social implications of technology with design methods to suggest alternative future possibilities. At Cornell, she leads the Culturally Embedded Computing research group, is a member of the Cornell Initiative for Digital Agriculture, and is a faculty fellow of the Atkinson Center for Sustainability. Her awards and honors include a Fulbright Fellowship (1998), an NSF CAREER Award (2003), and membership in the SIGCHI Academy (2023), among others.  

Snavely was recognized for contributions to computer vision and computer graphics. His research focuses on 3D reconstruction and understanding of scenes from multiple images. His awards and honors include a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2011), an NSF CAREER award (2012), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2012), an NSF Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2013), and the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH)’s Significant New Researcher Award (2014), among others. His teaching honors include the Cornell College of Engineering Mr. and Mrs. Richard F. Tucker Teaching Excellence Award (2012).

Weinberger was recognized for contributions to machine learning and deep learning. He studies machine learning and its applications, specifically machine learning under resource constraints, in the context of autonomous vehicles, metric learning, and Gaussian Processes. Among his awards and honors are an NSF CAREER award (2012), a finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards (2021), and the Daniel M. Lazar '29 Excellence in Teaching Award. He was named president of the International Machine Learning Society last year. Most recently, Weinberger – along with colleague Claire Cardie, professor of computer science and information science – was elected an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) fellow for 2024.

Through its fellowship program, ACM – the largest and most prestigious society of computing professionals – recognizes the top 1% of members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.

The trio from Cornell Bowers CIS will be inducted as fellows during the ACM awards banquet in June.

By Louis DiPietro, a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.