Information Science Ph.D. students from Cornell University’s Ithaca, NY, and New York City campuses convened on Friday, September 30, in Ithaca for the student-run semester research retreat. 

Cornell Tech-based Ph.Ds made the roughly 5-hour bus ride upstate to take part in the all-day event. 

Students spent the bulk of Friday morning and afternoon in the Statler Hotel’s Kerkorian Kemper Amphitheater, sharing research and discussing department life, and challenges and strategies.  

During the research session, about 40 students, including five department faculty members, broke into nine groups based on their research interests, with groups giving five-minute presentations on the work they do in areas like computer supported cooperative work, science and technology studies, design, human behavior and more.  

Later in the afternoon, students attended an optional campus tour and weekly social hour sponsored by the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. On Saturday morning, some Ph.Ds. closed out the retreat by attending Ithaca’s annual Applefest on The Commons. 

On the heels of a multimillion-dollar partnership launched last spring, stakeholders from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and LinkedIn convened for three days of research sharing and events to kickoff this first-of-its-kind partnership.

The series of events, which took place September 7 through 9 on Cornell University’s Ithaca, NY, campus, brought together researchers from across Cornell Bowers CIS’s three departments and included several presentations from faculty and student researchers, including recipients of the inaugural research grants announced in June. 

When asked during a job interview to describe a time she navigated a team through a challenge, Amber Li ’22 had a good example at the ready, an interpersonal challenge drawn from her first semester as a Master of Professional Studies student in Information Science.   

In Fall 2021, a teammate in the program’s hallmark course, MPS Project Practicum (INFO 5900), challenged Li’s qualification as the team’s project manager on a user-interface/user-experience project for an education tech startup. The teammate wanted someone more versed in information science, and UI/UX specifically, in the role. Li was admittedly fuzzy on UI/UX, but felt her past experience in project management qualified her to lead the team.   

“I had to go out of my way to gain the teammate’s trust and to show them I was willing to learn and steer the team with my expertise of other fields,” she said.   

Her confidence and approach proved spot on. Li and her team delivered, earning an A+. And that job interview? She nailed it: this fall, Li starts her post-graduate career in Miami as a business analyst for consulting firm McKinsey & Company.   

“Because Information Science at Cornell is interdisciplinary, every student is challenged to think critically,” she said. “That critical-thinking ability solves problems in a consulting setting.”  

Li’s tale from her job search underscores the relevance and real-world application of an MPS education in Information Science, where students are equipped with technical and professional skills to excel at leading technology companies.  

With no core courses, the MPS program allows students like Li to tailor their studies to meet their career goals. She credits the program’s flexibility in allowing her to explore other courses outside of information science, like Management Consulting Essentials (NBA 5690), the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management course taught by Randy Allen ’68, senior lecturer and consultant in residence. The course ultimately guided her career path.   

“Before that class, I didn’t really know what consulting entailed,” she said, noting her respect for Allen, who was one of the first female partners at Deloitte Consulting in the early 80s. “I look up to her and really think of her as my role model who motivated me to work hard in that class.”   

Having completed her undergraduate studies in supply chain and logistics management at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver, Li opted for the Data Science focus area for her year-long MPS education. Upon first arriving at Cornell, she set realistic short-term goals to maximize her course studies. Li saw that tackling course work and a job search simultaneously in the first semester wasn’t feasible, so she set aside recruiting until the Spring semester.   

“I was sort of a black sheep of our program cohort because I didn’t start looking for a job right away,” she said. “Everyone has their own pace, and I determined in that first semester of the MPS that I wouldn’t have the capacity for recruiting. Coming back from winter break, I started to prepare. Things worked out because I was able to use resources that were available to me.”   

Resources like Rebecca Salk, professional development advisor in the Department of Information Science, who reviewed Li’s resumé and cover letter and reassured Li of her job readiness after a frustrating round of job interviews that failed to yield an offer. She also credits a mentor from the Cornell Consulting Club, where Li was a member, for guidance in helping land the McKinsey position. 

With current and prospective MPS students in mind, Li encouraged students to branch out and get involved – join a club, make connections, take courses you wouldn’t otherwise take, and build relationships with professors. 

“I didn’t come into Cornell thinking that I would land a consulting job after this. I considered many other options. I thought about going into project management at a hardware tech company. The most important thing is to not be afraid to branch out and to not stay in your comfort zone,” she said. “Because information science students have such flexibility, put the thought into what courses to choose. Don’t just think, ‘This course will be good for my GPA.’ The program is so short, so every opportunity to learn and interact with professors is super valuable.” 

Connect with Amber Li on LinkedIn 

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

Cornell researchers have developed a fairer system for recommending items — whether a hotel, job-seeker, or the next video in the queue — so that a few top hits don’t get all the exposure.   

The new ranking system still provides relevant options, but divides user attention more equitably across search results. It could be applied in any two-sided market, such as travel sites, hiring platforms, and news aggregators.

Yuta Saito, a graduate student in the field of computer science and Thorsten Joachims, professor of computer science and information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, described their new system in “Fair Ranking as Fair Division: Impact-Based Individual Fairness in Ranking,” in the Proceedings of the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) Conference.

“In recommender systems and search engines, whoever gets ranked high draws a lot of benefit from that,” Joachims said. “The user's attention is a limited resource and we need to distribute it fairly among the items.”

Conventional recommender systems attempt to rank items purely according to what users want to see, but that can give many items an unfair spot in the order. Items with similar merit can end up far apart in the rankings, and for some items, the odds of being discovered on a platform are worse than random chance.

To correct this issue, Saito developed an improved ranking system based on ideas borrowed from economics. He applied principles of “fair division” — how to allocate a limited resource, such as food, fairly among members of a group.

Saito and Joachims demonstrated the feasibility of the ranking system using synthetic and real-world data. They found it offers viable search results for the user, while fulfilling the following three fair division criteria. Every item’s benefit from being ranked on the platform is better than being discovered at random; no item's impact, such as revenue, can easily be improved, and no item envies the allocation of positions for the other items.

“We redefined fairness in ranking completely,” Saito said. “It can be applied to any type of two-sided ranking system.”  

If employed on YouTube, for example, the recommender system would present a more varied stream of videos, potentially distributing earnings more evenly to content creators. “We want to satisfy the users of the platform, of course, but we should also be fair to the video creators, to sustain their long-term diversity,” Saito said.

In online hiring platforms, the fairer system would ensure that all qualified candidates receive a ranking that is better than one due to random chance, guaranteeing that there is a benefit to participating in the platform. Such a shift would diversify the search results, instead of showing the same top candidates to all employers.

The researchers point out that this type of recommender system could also help viewers find new movies to watch online, enable scientists to find relevant presentations at conferences, and provide a more balanced selection of news stories to consumers.

The National Science Foundation and the Funai Foundation for Information Technology provided funding for the research.

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

Even before she applied to Cornell, Chenchen Lu ’23 was drawn to the Cornell Chimes by the large scale of the instrument, which commands the entire Ithaca campus as its audience.

Now a chimesmaster, Lu has greatly expanded that audience by bringing her performances on the chimes to TikTok, amassing a following of more than 140,000 in the last year.

“I didn’t expect so many people to be interested in bells or this kind of music,” Lu said. “It’s been rewarding just to see so many people genuinely curious about the instrument and this raw, kind of weird sound quality that I’ve grown to love. It’s also brought more recognition to the instrument and to Cornell.”

The Cornell Chimes consist of 21 bells that sit 173 feet above central campus in McGraw Tower. They mark time for the university, ringing each quarter hour and regaling campus with three concerts per day during the school year. The concerts are played by chimesmasters, often students, who submit to a rigorous, 10-week application process that opens each spring. Playing the chimes requires physical stamina and is impressive to watch – chimesmasters push the heavy levers with hands and one foot while standing on the other.

Lu began posting chimes videos on TikTok in June 2021 and went viral for the first time in July of that year, with a movie theme song that now has 1.4 million views. The number of followers on Lu’s account then grew exponentially.

 

 

 

The success prompted her to continue posting new songs, while answering questions about the chimes in the comments and taking requests. She’s played everything from classical favorites, like Felix Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” (2.6 million views), to movie and show theme songs to classic and current rock and pop music, with 4.5 million likes on her posts so far. She’s also created content answering frequently asked questions about the chimes, chronicled a day in the life of a chimesmaster, and documented trips to other bell towers.

Lu said posting to TikTok motivates her to play more and improve her skills. “I really just like playing,” she said. “We have a library with thousands of songs, and I like to challenge myself with songs that are more difficult and to try to learn songs that people really like.”

The most gratifying interactions Lu has had on TikTok are with people who comment that her playing has inspired them to pick up or return to an instrument, or one woman who posted a video saying she’d spent all day listening to and enjoying Lu’s songs.

An information science major in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Lu has also found connections between the chimes and her academic life. She applied her coursework and interest in user experience design to redesign Cornell Chimes’ database of song arrangements, providing more functionality for different types of users – applicants or “compets,” librarians, chimesmasters and head chimesmasters.

“All of these people have slightly different needs, and I wanted to make sure we had a database that not only looked more modern but could accommodate these different functionalities,” Lu said.

The new database will also make collaboration easier – currently the process for adding a new song to the library requires the chimesmasters to add new arrangements to a binder, where others can practice it, comment on it, and vote on whether to add it to the library. With Lu’s database, the chimesmasters will be able to propose a song and read comments online, without needing to be in McGraw Tower. Alumni chimesmasters are helping to build the database from Lu’s design and hope to provide a demonstration at their annual Chimes Advisory Council in September.

While a future in the technology sector awaits, Lu said it will be difficult to give up the bells, which have defined and shaped her experience of Cornell, even before she arrived on campus. A piano and cello player all her life, Lu applied to Cornell in part because of the chimes.

“I just thought it was super unique, and I liked that it was very loud, that it forces people to listen,” she said. “I think about bells a lot now in my everyday life. Even when I listen to songs casually, I think, ‘Could this be arranged into a chimes song?’ I’ve also made really good friends through this program. We share this very niche interest that only we can talk about, so it’s very bonding. And playing music together is always super fun.”

By Caitlin Hayes for the Cornell Chronicle

 

 

The Presidential Advisors on Diversity and Equity (PADE) have awarded three Belonging at Cornell innovation grants for 2022 programming, for projects addressing a range of topics involving diversity, equity and inclusion on all of Cornell’s campuses.

B@C (Belonging at Cornell) 360, to be anchored by “Impact Week” (scheduled for Sept. 28-Oct. 4), received one of the grants. LeeAnn Roberts, director for the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and Jami Joyner, director of Diversity Programs in Engineering are the program leads.

The event is a collaboration of the Cornell Bowers CIS; the College of Architecture, Art and Planning; the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; the College of Engineering; Cornell Law School; Cornell Tech; Cornell University Library; the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business; and Weill Cornell Medicine.

Impact Week is a new college-wide event that encourages each entity to demonstrate and celebrate the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging through a series of events that reflects their respective fields of study. An inaugural cohort of 30 representatives will then be recruited to form the B@C 360 Collaborative, which will address issues identified in the 2020 Belonging at Cornell survey.

The project concludes with a one-day retreat, where diversity leads within the colleges and units will engage in professional development workshops, team-building activities and other support opportunities.

Similar to last year, PADE had originally sought two projects in its request for proposals, but three projects stood out such that the advisers increased the number of grantees, while staying within the original award total of $30,000.

The grant committee sought proposals that align with the objectives of improving the Cornell experience for students, faculty and staff, and fostering a sense of belonging, promoting fair treatment and supporting the environment of Cornell as a great place to study and work. Collaboration across colleges and units, and a promise to drive sustained impact to the Cornell community, were key criteria for the grant selection.

The grant program is one of the actions taken in response to issues identified through the Belonging at Cornell survey, sent in February 2020 to faculty and staff on the Ithaca, Geneva and Cornell Tech campuses, which asked about their sense of belonging, fair treatment, willingness to recommend Cornell, and experience with marginalizing behaviors.

Read more about the other grant recipients in this Cornell Chronicle story.

By Tom Fleischman

Professor Lawrence Blume, the Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor of Economics, Professor of Information Science, and the Charles F. and Barbara D. Weiss Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Information Science, has been named the Interim Associate Dean for Education. Blume will be fulfilling this role while Professor Claire Cardie, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering in the departments of computer science and information science, is on sabbatical for the 2022-2023 academic year.

As the Interim Associate Dean for Education, Blume will provide leadership to ensure the college continues to deliver exceptional educational programs – including curriculum, instruction, advising, and learning experiences – to the college’s growing student population. He will also represent Cornell Bowers CIS on university and college committees.

“Larry has been a mentor and role model to countless students as well as an outstanding member of the faculty,” said Kavita Bala, dean of Cornell Bowers CIS in a message to the community. “I look forward to working with him in his new leadership role as we continue to strengthen our educational programs.”

Blume received a B.A. in Economics from Washington University and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley and was one of the general editors of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition, to which he contributed several articles on economic theory. He is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Visiting Research Professor at Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS).   He has been  a member of the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, where he has served as Co-Director of the Economics Program and on the Institute's steering committee. 

In addition to his administrative duties as Interim Associate Dean for Education and the  Charles F. and Barbara D. Weiss Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Information Science, he will continue to teach and conduct research in general equilibrium theory and game theory, as well as income and wealth distribution and network design.

 

Employing artificial intelligence to help improve outcomes for people with cardiovascular disease is the focus of a three-year, $15 million collaboration among Cornell Tech, the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Cornell Bowers CIS) and NewYork-Presbyterian – with physicians from its affiliated medical schools Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (Columbia University VP&S).

The Cardiovascular AI Initiative, to be funded by NewYork-Presbyterian, was launched this summer in a virtual meeting featuring approximately 40 representatives from the institutions. 

“AI is poised to fundamentally transform outcomes in cardiovascular health care by providing doctors with better models for diagnosis and risk prediction in heart disease,” said Kavita Bala, professor of computer science and dean of Cornell Bowers CIS. “This unique collaboration between Cornell’s world-leading experts in machine learning and AI and outstanding cardiologists and clinicians from NewYork-Presbyterian, Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia will drive this next wave of innovation for long-lasting impact on cardiovascular health care.”  

“NewYork-Presbyterian is thrilled to be joining forces with Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS to harness advanced technology and develop insights into the prediction and prevention of heart disease to benefit our patients,” said Dr. Steven J. Corwin, president and chief executive officer of NewYork-Presbyterian. “Together with our world-class physicians from Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia, we can transform the way health care is delivered.”

The collaboration aims to improve heart failure treatment, as well as predict and prevent heart failure. Researchers from Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS, along with physicians from Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia University VP&S, will use AI and machine learning to examine data from NewYork-Presbyterian in an effort to detect patterns that will help physicians predict who will develop heart failure, inform care decisions and tailor treatments for their patients.

“Artificial intelligence and technology are changing our society and the way we practice medicine,” said Dr. Nir Uriel, director of advanced heart failure and cardiac transplantation at NewYork-Presbyterian, an adjunct professor of medicine in the Greenberg Division of Cardiology at Weill Cornell Medicine and a professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. “We look forward to building a bridge into the future of medicine, and using advanced technology to provide tools to enhance care for our heart failure patients.”

The Cardiovascular AI Initiative will develop advanced machine-learning techniques to learn and discover interactions across a broad range of cardiac signals, with the goal of providing improved recognition accuracy of heart failure and extend the state of care beyond current, codified and clinical decision-making rules. It will also use AI techniques to analyze raw data from time series (EKG) and imaging data.

“Major algorithmic advances are needed to derive precise and reliable clinical insights from complex medical data,” said Deborah Estrin, the Robert V. Tishman ’37 Professor of Computer Science, associate dean for impact at Cornell Tech and a professor of population health science at Weill Cornell Medicine. “We are excited about the opportunity to partner with leading cardiologists to advance the state-of-the-art in caring for heart failure and other challenging cardiovascular conditions.”

Researchers and clinicians anticipate the data will help answer questions around heart failure prediction, diagnosis, prognosis, risk and treatment, and guide physicians as they make decisions related to heart transplants and left ventricular assist devices (pumps for patients who have reached end-stage heart failure). 

Future research will tackle the important task of heart failure and disease prediction, to facilitate earlier intervention for those most likely to experience heart failure, and preempt progression and damaging events. Ultimately this would also include informing the specific therapeutic decisions most likely to work for individuals.

At the initiative launch, Bala spoke of Cornell’s Radical Collaboration initiative in AI, and the key areas in which she sees AI – a discipline in which Cornell ranks near the top of U.S. universities – playing a major role in the future.

“We identified health and medicine as one of Cornell’s key impact areas in AI,” she said, “so the timing of this collaboration could not have been more perfect. We are excited for this partnership as we consider high-risk, high-reward, long-term impact in this space.”

By Tom Fleischman for the Cornell Chronicle

 

A recently implemented university data visualization tool, designed by researchers from Cornell’s Future of Learning Lab, crunches years’ worth of undergraduate enrollment data and shows students the varied – and sometimes winding – academic paths Cornellians have forged from acceptance letter to diploma.

The platform, called Pathways, was designed to assist and inspire current students as they explore and make informed decisions such as choosing courses and majors. Pathways was launched in the spring 2022 semester as students began pre-enrolling for fall 2022 courses.

Mina Chen, a doctoral student in the field of information science, led the Pathways research and development team and wrote a corresponding paper, “Pathways: Exploring Academic Interests with Historical Course Enrollment Records,” which was presented in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, held in June at Cornell Tech.

“Every semester, it can be very overwhelming for students to decide on what courses to take. Students commonly turn to their upperclassmen for advice, but the information they gather can be limiting and biased because it relies heavily on their social network.” Chen said. “With Pathways, it’s like giving students access to the whole campus. We’re showing students four-year course plans that others have made.”

Drawing on a dozen years of anonymized Cornell course-enrollment data, Pathway prompts inquiring students with a few simple questions – “What’s your major?” or, if undecided, “What are your interests?” – and then retrieves academic majors and corresponding four-year course plans based on past Cornellians who shared similar interests.

For example, a first-year student interested in web design, architecture, and music would find five academic pathways from past Cornellians as inspiration, perhaps as a music major or a computer science major with a music minor. Each path includes a rundown of classes other musically minded computer scientists have taken during their time at Cornell.

The intent behind Pathways, Chen said, was to design a data-based tool to turn academic decision-making into a learning process. This may help and empower students to approach their academic careers with more agency, curiosity and self-efficacy, researchers said.

“This research is an important step toward finding scalable solutions to support students in the process of interest exploration and course choice by strategically using historical information that all universities collect by default,” said René Kizilcec, assistant professor of information science, director of the Future of Learning Lab, and Pathways’ faculty lead. “I expect that we will see more data-driven tools like this one on university campuses to improve transparency and access to data about academic choices and their consequences.“

In a study carried out with 15 current Cornell students who tested Pathways, the Cornell team learned the critical role chance and unexpectedness play in molding students’ initial interests into academic pursuits. One student in the study took a food science course because “it sounds cool,” grew disinterested in the ensuing lab work, but discovered a budding interest in food marketing, an area she didn’t initially consider.

Pathways’ inclusion of diverse courses – the seemingly random literature or biology course – are drawn from the academic paths of past Cornellians and are intended to nudge students toward these unexpected and important learning encounters, Chen said, adding that the normative message sent by diverse past trajectories is also compelling.

“As students explore Pathways, they get to see the diverse choices others have made and begin to understand there is no right or wrong academic trajectory, and it’s okay to take time to figure one’s own pathway out.” she said. “The concept of a major is an institutional product. It’s what the university defines. But students’ imaginations are more nuanced and flexible than that. Pathways is a way of having students develop their interests and hone their academic pursuits on their own terms.”

The Pathways team is Chen, Fynn Datoo ‘23, Wentao Guo ‘22, Calix Huang, Jay Joo ‘24, Sofia Yoon ‘22 and Kizilcec. Former members of the team are Martha Brandt ‘21, Annie Fu ‘20, Rebecca Fu ‘21, Jennifer Lee ‘21, Ian Wilken Tomasik ’21 and Andrew Xu ‘24.

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