As part of the largest graduating class in the history of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, a few graduates in the Class of 2023 shared reflections on their undergraduate years. With varied accomplishments at Cornell, their wide-ranging educational initiatives embody their ingenuity and perseverance.

Ishika Agrawal 

What have you accomplished as a Cornell student that you are most proud of, either inside the classroom or otherwise?

I’m most proud of Pavvilion, a startup I launched with my peers, Nina, Max, Lizzie, Meredith and Noah. Starting within the Cornell Tech Policy Lab, it's been an incredible journey from the initial sketches to figuring out what it takes to build an app to conducting user interviews and testing to finally launching this past semester and getting 300 users. Taking this leap into the world of entrepreneurship has taught me so many valuable lessons about balancing user and business goals, legal questions about privacy and security, selling our idea to users and investors and putting myself out there to start something completely from scratch.

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Sydney Bednar 

What was your favorite class and why?

I took INFO 3450: Human-Computer-Interaction Design with Prof. Gilly Leshed, and it was my first exposure to user-centered design. We spent the semester learning about design principles and ethics and then applying that to our own semester-long group projects where we were tasked with designing a technology that solves a social problem. My group created an application to help people quit vaping. This project required us to conduct user interviews, as well as complete other outside research before settling on a design, which helped ensure that we properly responded to user needs. I loved this class because it was challenging but also very applicable. The skills I gained over the course of that semester have been incredibly useful in my job as a product designer, as well as in many of my other classes at Cornell.

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Jeremy Jung 

Who or what influenced your Cornell education the most? How or why?

I still vividly remember the moment in office hours for Numerical Analysis, where I was having a one-on-one conversation with Professor Alexander Vladimirsky. I was confiding to him about how I found the material very difficult and felt insecure that I was asking too many clarifying questions during class. In response, he told me that asking questions takes courage — a lot of others have the same questions but don’t have the willingness to speak up. He then encouraged me to ask even more questions, as they helped not just me, but the entire class. It was at this moment that I realized that learning only happens when I remove my fear of judgment. Only when I am vulnerable can I be fully receptive to learning everything the world has to offer.

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Hal Reed 

Why did you choose Cornell?

When I was figuring out which schools to apply to, I had the goal of studying computer science in the context of humanities frameworks; I had a lot of curiosity about computing and enjoyed building technological skills, but I also wanted to continue practicing my passions for media and history. The fact that Cornell offered a CS major in Arts & Sciences connected deeply with me, and I was even further excited by the Milstein Program in Technology & Humanities and their goals to pursue the same intersections I valued. Looking back, I am grateful for whatever wisdom my 17-year-old self had: the fact that my path evolved from CS to information science and history has shown me the importance of faculty and structures that promote academic exploration.

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Lirong Yao

Where do you dream to be in 10 years?

I dream of working as a research scientist on cutting-edge technology to build real artificial intelligence machines. This has been my long-standing ambition even before I started studying at Cornell. Pursuing a computer science degree here has been a step toward achieving that goal.

Since its first iteration in Spring 2019, the Cornell Information Science student project showcase has blossomed into a can’t-miss event at the end of every semester, featuring a panoply of innovation in user experience design and research, robotic prototypes, app design, and much more.

More than 40 student teams gathered in Baker Atrium in the Physical Sciences Building on Thursday, May 11, for the Spring 2023 showcase. They represented three Information Science courses: “Introduction to Rapid Prototyping and Physical Computing,” “Qualitative User Research and Design Methods,” and “App Design and Prototyping.”

Below is a sampling of the projects:

INFO 4320/5321: Introduction to Rapid Prototyping and Physical Computing

Instructor: Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science

INFO 4320 challenges students to build robotic prototypes using techniques like laser cutting, 3D printing, and microcontroller programming. The final projects do not disappoint. From an M&M Launcher and Piano Painter to a Lego sorter and Beer Pong Robot, students take skills learned in the classroom and mix in creativity and fun to build interactive, working prototypes for classmates to test at the event. This semester, 16 teams presented projects like a watercolor painter, robotic chess game, and a sand mandala generator.

Anchey Peng ’24, Luke Murphy ’23, and Sarah Shin MPS ’23 built a beautiful electronic pinball machine using three ESP 32s – a low-cost microcontroller – and 3D-printed components.

Dance through a rowdy house party, fight off dangerous fruit, and pull a fast one on a bubble gum cartel at the Game Design Initiative at Cornell (GDIAC) showcase, held Saturday, May 20 from 1-4 p.m. in Clark Atrium in the Physical Sciences Building.

The event allows students in the CIS 3152 Intro to Game Development and CIS 4152 Advanced Game Development courses to show off their final projects. Members of the general public are invited to play the games and vote for their favorites. At the end of the showcase, the most popular games will receive awards.

“The student teams have created some especially innovative titles this year with impressive graphics and unusual game mechanics,” said Walker White, M.S. ’98, Ph.D. ’00, senior lecturer, Stephen H. Weiss Provost’s Teaching Fellow and GDIAC director in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

For example, the showcase will feature Reharmonia, the first mobile “strand game,” a genre where players deliver cargo between isolated locations. In Reharmonia, players must balance an unwieldy backpack as they travel across an unpredictable landscape. In another game, Pivot, players explore a 3D world, viewing it through constantly shifting 2D cross-sections.

A total of 21 PC and mobile games will be available to play. More information about the showcase can be found here. 

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

The Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science awarded 10 faculty members annual excellence awards for the 2022-2023 academic year.

Five were honored for exceptional research, and another five were honored for teaching and advising excellence during a reception held Friday, May 12, in Willard Straight Hall.

Ann S. Bowers ’59 Research Awards

Nate Foster, interim associate dean for research, presented the Ann S. Bowers ’59 Research Excellence Awards to the following faculty. The award recognizes scholars, their research contributions, and reputation in and impact on their respective fields.

Nicki Dell is an associate professor of information science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in Cornell Bowers CIS. Dell develops technology oriented toward social impact, improving the lives of underserved communities around the world. She has done work at the intersection of health and technology, with projects that seek to strengthen community health programs in low-income areas and provide useful technology for home health workers. More recently, she and her collaborators created the Clinic to End Tech Abuse (CETA), which provides direct help to survivors of intimate partner violence. Foster commended Dell’s “‘soup to nuts’-style research, taking innovative ideas and then building teams to truly move the needle. This style of work is both a hallmark of Cornell Bowers CIS and Cornell Tech.”

Steve Jackson is a professor of information science and science and technology studies whose work applies a social science lens to developments in technology. Jackson has long been a leader in the areas of infrastructure studies and maintenance studies. Most recently, Jackson’s research has explored "computing on earth," with a focus on the ecological impact of computing. “He looks at interactions between citizen and state, between vendor and consumer, between haves and have nots, and he identifies new roadmaps for the thoughtful development of technology in our lives,” Foster said in announcing Jackson’s award. “Steve is one of our stars: a leading scholar who truly brings an interdisciplinary and human-centered approach to his work—very much the spirit of Bowers CIS.”

Thorsten Joachims is a professor of computer science and information science and associate dean for research in Cornell Bowers CIS. A fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Joachims is widely recognized as a world leader in the field of machine learning. His early work on text categorization established support vector machines as a go-to method for text classification. While continuing work on related topics in machine learning and data mining, Joachims broadened his scope, making deep investments in recommendation systems, a technology that powers some of the most successful web-based technologies. Joachims is also a leader at Cornell, where he was instrumental in helping create the AI Radical Collaboration and the Cornell AI Initiative.

Kengo Kato is a professor of statistics and data science. Kato is widely known for his work in mathematical statistics, which has applications to many fields, including probability theory, economics, and machine learning. Kato has made path-breaking contributions to a variety of disciplines, solving multiple open problems and winning international awards in the process. His work related to the central limit theorem paved the way in the development of theory-guided inference methods for a broad class of high-dimensional statistical problems. Kato is now branching out with colleagues into new research areas, including notions of sparsity and statistical properties of Wasserstein distance.

Alexandra Silva is a professor of computer science and one of the world leaders in the area of formal verification. She is widely known for her leading work on co-algebraic techniques for modeling of systems. 

“What’s remarkable about Alexandra is that she is not just a theoretician; she also applies these ideas to practical systems,” Foster said, citing Silva’s decade-long collaboration on the NetKAT system with Foster and Dexter Kozen, the Joseph Newton Pew Jr. Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science. He also cited her work applying automata learning to automatically build models of protocols like TCP and QUIC, finding bugs in real-world implementations.

Teaching and Advising Awards

Larry Blume, interim associate dean for education in Cornell Bowers CIS, presented the excellence awards in teaching and advising.

Anne Bracy is a senior lecturer of computer science. She has taught nearly every computer science undergraduate major, introduced innovative methods to her classrooms, and shared them with colleagues in the Department of Computer Science. “Her evals are off the charts,” Blume said in announcing Bracy’s award. “She is an extremely active mentor and maintains contact with a large network of alumni.”  During her time at Cornell, Bracy has received the Tau Beta Pi Professor of the Year award (2019), the College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award (2017), and the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates’ Faculty of the Year award (2015-2016).

Joe Guinness is an associate professor of statistics and data science and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Statistics and Data Science. An expert in modeling and analysis of large spatial-temporal datasets – particularly with applications in earth sciences – Guinness leads “Introduction to R Programming” (STSCI 2120/5120) and “Statistical Computing” (STSCI 4520/5520), guides undergraduate-level study courses, and advises on graduate-level research projects.

Karen Levy is an associate professor of information science who has taught six wide-ranging courses over the past six years.One of them is “Choices and Consequences in Computing” (INFO 1260), which she co-teaches with Jon Kleinberg, Tisch University Professor of Computer Science. 

“The material in this class is very abstract, and she and Jon do spectacular work in opening it up to students,” Blume said. The proof, Blume added, is that enrollment for the course jumped nearly 50% – from below 500 to now more than 700 – in the first two years of the course. INFO 1260 is a gateway class to the major, and students often report that this class is what drew them in, Blume said. He cited the remarkably high class evaluations for INFO 1260 and another course Levy teaches – “Surveillance and Privacy” (INFO 4250).

Phoebe Sengers is a professor of information science who developed “Designing Technology for Social Impact” (INFO 4240), a course that Blume called a “key class in the information science design track.” The course covers what and how values can be embodied in design. Student work includes extensive readings, design workbooks and design mini-projects that exercise the design concepts students learn in the class. Starting with 38 students in its first run, it is now Information Science’s fifth largest course, Blume said, noting that students have called the course "transformative."

Robbert van Renesse is a professor of computer science who has made substantial intellectual contributions to the development of teaching methods for operating systems. Van Renesse has renovated the core course, CS 4410/5410 and its practicum, CS 4411/5411, and is developing a book around this material. “Van Renesse has had an amazing impact on how operating systems are taught today at Cornell and how the entire computer science department handles examinations,” wrote a nominating colleague.

Artificial intelligence-powered writing assistants that autocomplete sentences or offer “smart replies” not only put words into people’s mouths, they also put ideas into their heads, according to new research.

Maurice Jakesch, a doctoral student in the field of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science asked more than 1,500 participants to write a paragraph answering the question, “Is social media good for society?” People who used a writing assistant that was biased for or against social media were twice as likely to write a paragraph agreeing with the AI, and significantly more likely to say they held the same opinion, compared to people who wrote without an AI’s help.

The study suggests that the biases baked into AI writing tools – whether intentional or unintentional – could have concerning repercussions for culture and politics, the researchers said.

“We’re rushing to implement these AI models in all walks of life, but we need to better understand the implications,” said co-author Mor Naaman, professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and of information science at Cornell Bowers CIS.  “Apart from increasing efficiency and creativity, there could be other consequences for individuals and also for our society – shifts in language and opinions.”

While others have looked at how large language models, like ChatGPT, can create persuasive ads and political messages, this is the first study to show that the process of writing with an AI can sway a person’s opinions. Jakesch presented the study, “Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users’ Views,” at the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in April, where the paper received an honorable mention.

To understand how people interact with AI writing assistants, Jakesch steered a large language model to have either a positive or negative opinion of social media. Participants wrote a paragraph – alone or with one of the opinionated assistants – on a platform he built that mimics a social media website. The platform collects data from participants as they type, such as which suggestions from the AI they accept, and how long they take to compose the paragraph.

People who co-wrote with the pro-social media AI assistant composed more sentences arguing that social media is good, and vice versa, compared to participants without a writing assistant, as determined by independent judges. These participants also were more likely to profess their AI’s opinion in a follow-up survey.

The researchers explored the possibility that people were simply accepting the AI’s suggestions to complete the task quicker, but even participants who took several minutes to compose their paragraphs came up with heavily influenced statements. The survey revealed that a majority of the participants did not even notice the AI was biased and didn’t realize they were being influenced.

“The process of co-writing doesn’t really feel like I’m being persuaded,” said Naaman. “It feels like I’m doing something very natural and organic – I’m expressing my own thoughts with some aid.”

When repeating the experiment with a different topic, the research team again saw that participants were swayed by the AI. Now, the team is looking into how this experience creates the shift, and how long the effects last.

Just as social media has changed the political landscape by facilitating the spread of misinformation and the formation of echo chambers, biased AI writing tools could produce similar shifts in opinions, depending on which tools users choose. For example, some organizations have announced they plan to develop an alternative to ChatGPT, designed to express more conservative viewpoints.

These technologies deserve more public discussion regarding how they could be misused and how they should be monitored and regulated, the researchers argue.

“The more powerful these technologies become and the more deeply we embed them in the social fabric of our societies,” Jakesch said, “the more careful we might want to be about how we’re governing the values, priorities, and opinions built into them.”

Advait Bhat from Microsoft Research, Daniel Buschek of the University of Bayreuth, and Lior Zalmanson of Tel Aviv University contributed to the paper.

Support for the work came from the National Science Foundation, the German National Academic Foundation, and the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts.

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

Cornell researchers have developed a robot called ReMotion that occupies physical space on a remote user’s behalf, automatically mirroring the user’s movements in real time and conveying key body language that is lost in standard virtual environments.

“Pointing gestures, the perception of another’s gaze, intuitively knowing where someone’s attention is – in remote settings, we lose these nonverbal, implicit cues that are very important for carrying out design activities,” said Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student in the field of information science.

Sakashita is the lead author of “ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment,” which he presented at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany in April. “With ReMotion, we show that we can enable rapid, dynamic interactions through the help of a mobile, automated robot.”

With further development, ReMotion could be deployed in virtual collaborative environments as well as in classrooms and other educational settings, Sakashita said.

The idea for ReMotion came out of Sakashita’s experience as a teaching assistant for a popular rapid prototyping course in the spring 2020 semester, which was held largely online due to COVID-19. Confined with students to a virtual learning environment, Sakashita came to understand that physical movement is vital in collaborative design projects: teammates lean in to survey parts of the prototype; they inspect circuits, troubleshoot faulty code together and then may draw up solutions on a nearby whiteboard.

This range of motion is all but lost in a virtual environment, as are the subtle ways collaborators communicate through body language and expressions, he said.

“It was super challenging to teach. There are so many tasks that are involved when you're doing a hands-on design activity,” Sakashita said. “The kind of instinctive, dynamic transitions we make – like gesturing or addressing a collaborator – are too dynamic to simulate through Zoom.”

The lean, nearly six-foot-tall ReMotion device itself is outfitted with a monitor for a head, omnidirectional wheels for feet and game-engine software for brains. It automatically mirrors the remote user’s movements – thanks to another Cornell-made device, Neckface, which the remote user wears to track head and body movements. The motion data is then sent remotely to the ReMotion robot in real-time. 

Telepresence robots are not new, but remote users generally need to steer them manually, distracting from the task at hand, researchers said. Other options such as virtual reality and mixed reality collaboration can also require an active role from the user and headsets may limit peripheral awareness, researchers added.

In a small study of about a dozen participants, nearly all reported a heightened sense of co-presence and behavioral interdependence when using ReMotion compared to an existing telerobotic system. Participants also reported significantly higher shared attention among remote collaborators.

In its current form, ReMotion only works with two users in a one-on-one remote environment, and each user must occupy physical spaces of identical size and layout. In future work, ReMotion developers intend to explore asymmetrical scenarios, like a single remote team member collaborating virtually via ReMotion with multiple teammates in a larger room.

Other co-authors are: Ruidong Zhang and Hyunju Kim, doctoral students in the field of information science; Xiaoyi Li, M.P.S. ’21; Michael Russo, M.P.S. ‘21; Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science; Malte Jung, associate professor of information science and the Nancy H. ’62 and Philip M. ’62 Young Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow; and François Guimbretière, professor of information science.

This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Nakajima Foundation.

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

Darren Key ’25 was tired of listening to the same lofi hip-hop songs over and over again while studying. “I love lofi music,” he said. “My thought process was, if I create an infinite radio of lofi music, it would help me study better.”

So, the computer science major made his own endless stream of AI-generated lofi hip-hop music by turning songs into an array of numbers, and taking a similar approach to Stable Diffusion, a AI text-to-image generator. He admits that the music isn't quite good enough for studying – he's still tweaking the AI – but the project was impressive enough to earn him an award at the Bits On Our Minds (BOOM) technology showcase, held April 27 in the Duffield Hall atrium. 

After a three-year pause due to COVID-19, BOOM returned to campus for its 25th anniversary. The event started in 1998 as a small showcase for computer science students, but is now hosted by the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and features cutting-edge technology projects from across the university. Nearly 100 students presented 32 projects in an atrium packed with visitors from Cornell and the broader Ithaca community.

Faculty from each department within Cornell Bowers CIS and representatives from seven corporate sponsors judged the projects. Selected teams received a trophy, certificate, and $750 prize;  Kavita Bala, dean of Cornell Bowers CIS, announced the awards.

“BOOM is a unique opportunity for students to demonstrate their technology projects to everyone from school kids to industry experts,” said Danica Rickards, program coordinator in Undergraduate Student Services, and BOOM committee chair. “They have a chance to really hone their elevator pitches and get input from corporate sponsors.” 

         The projects included Ithaca Hunt, an app to help new students explore off-campus activities with friends; Tree Folio, a city planning tool that converts remote sensing data collected by airplanes into a digital map of each tree and the shade it provides; and The Bookkeeper, which looks like a stack of books, but locks away mobile devices for a set time to help users focus.

The Ithaca High School’s Code Red Robotics team also attended the event with their 4-foot-tall robot, which lifts traffic cones and other objects and maneuvers around to deposit them on shelves.

One popular project was Cosmic Swing, a computer game created by Francisco Kyriacou ‘24, Ankit Lakkapragada ‘25, Emily Hong ‘23, Matthew Karwan ’24, and Joseph Tung ’24 for their CIS 3152 Intro to Game Development class. The team brought the game to BOOM to get feedback from users before putting on the finishing touches. The main character is a Martian who swings through spinning worlds using a rope-like appendage to collect resources for their dying home planet. 

“The special aspect of our game is that our world is rotating, so the players have to be making fast decisions to grab onto the rotating platforms,” said Hong, a design and environmental analysis major.

Ana Suppé ’23, an environmental science and sustainability major, and Griffin Blotner ’24, an information science major, came to BOOM to present their initiative to increase e-waste recycling on campus. Currently, there is one e-waste drop box at Barton Hall, and the campus recycles more than 100 tons each year, but that number has remained stagnant for more than a decade.

They hope to create greater awareness of the issue and to work with Cornell Bowers CIS, Cornell Engineering, the campus sustainability office, and Student and Campus Life to expand e-waste recycling options. “We’ve been talking with Facilities Management and other groups to get the ball rolling,” Suppé said.

All BOOM projects and descriptions are listed here. The awarded projects were:

Sponsor Awards (sponsors listed first)

·  Air Liquide: Tree Folio  

·  Boeing and LinkedIn: Xenophobia Meter

·  EY: Volume 

·  Goldman Sachs: Using VR to study food consumer behavior 

·  Pepsi and Sandia National Labs: AI-Learners  

Faculty Awards (Departments listed first)

·  Computer Science: LoFi Hip-Hop 

·  Information Science: Hack4Impact Earth Law Center Project 

·  Statistics and Data Science: Tree Folio 

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

The Yang-Tan WorkABILITY Incubator, recently launched through the ILR School’s Center for Applied Research on Work (CAROW), will support innovative applied research projects and collaborations that bring together two or more parts of the university to address important societal issues linked to work.

Funded through the generosity of K. Lisa Yang ’74, the incubator will provide support both to early stage projects and larger initiatives.

“Through applied research and collaboration across Cornell to create tools that will translate into equity and impact for individuals, CAROW and the Yang-Tan WorkABILITY Incubator will enable the ILR School to truly advance the world of work,” Yang said.

The incubator has already launched the Initiative on Home Care and Home Health Care Workers. It will also be the new home of the Criminal Justice and Employment Initiative. Both initiatives build a community of scholars and researchers across Cornell’s campuses.

“The Yang-Tan WorkABILITY Incubator provides CAROW with an engine through which to tackle the big, consequential challenges of our day in the areas of work, employment and labor,” said Ariel Avgar, Ph.D. ’08, the director of CAROW. “The two inaugural initiatives are a perfect case in point. Focusing on the working conditions of low-wage workers in health care and the equitable access to employment opportunities for justice- involved individuals builds on Cornell expertise with the goal of guiding action based on applied research.

“We owe a great debt to Lisa Yang’s vision and generosity, which have made this effort and approach possible,” Avgar said.

The Initiative on Home Care and Home Health Care Workers will be directed by Weill Cornell Medicine’s Dr. Madeline Sterling ’08. Nicola Dell, associate professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, will serve as director of technical innovation.

“This new initiative will drive rigorous interdisciplinary research on the link between working conditions, the home care workforce and the delivery of high-quality patient care with the goal of influencing practice and policy,” said Avgar, ILR’s senior associate dean for outreach and sponsored research.

Sterling is an expert on home care and its impact on the health of patients. Her research focuses on examining how home care services impact the delivery of care and novel ways to leverage the home care workforce to improve both worker and patient outcomes.

Dell studies human-computer interactions, computer security and privacy, and information and communication technologies and development. Dell’s health care work examines the potential for designing technologies that enhance equity for home care workers.

ILR’s Criminal Justice and Employment Initiative will receive funding from the incubator, in addition to its state funding. Directed by Timothy McNutt with Jodi Anderson serving as technical innovation director and Matt Saleh as research director, the initiative provides training on criminal records and employment law to job seekers who have been involved in the criminal legal system. The program also assists employers in developing fair chance hiring, engages in research to study reentry practices and works with policymakers and legislators on criminal justice reform.

McNutt has a background in criminal law, litigation and policy to improve employment opportunities for people with criminal records. He has interacted with hundreds of incarcerated and newly paroled people in the past five years to help them access and correct their criminal records, and get jobs. McNutt broadened the outreach through the incubator to include the Restorative Record Project, which helps job candidates create non-traditional résumés that highlight core competencies and micro-credentials.

Anderson, a Cornell Prison Education Program alumnus who earned a master’s degree from Stanford University, is the developer of Rézme, an app created to support justice-involved job candidates.

Saleh is a senior research associate at the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability at the ILR School. His research focuses on career pathways for youth with disabilities and on employment barriers such as justice involvement.

By Julie Greco, a senior communications specialist for the ILR School.

This story was originally published in the Cornell Chronicle.

In higher education, universities have long been viewed as pipelines, preparing students for productive careers in specific fields. But when it comes to understanding how students actually make their way through college, the “pipeline” imagery fails to capture the twists and turns real people often take along the way. 

A group of scholars led by René Kizilcec, assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, is calling for a new, data-informed model for the study of academic progress that leverages the trove of student data colleges and universities already possess. They urge researchers and policymakers to replace the “pipeline” metaphor with “pathways,” an updated, data-centric approach that accounts for the complexity of university curriculums and students’ journeys through them, providing critical information for researchers, university administrators, and students alike. 

In a paper published in the journal Science on April 28, professors from nine universities — including Stanford, Columbia, Texas A&M, and the University of Pennsylvania – said this shift toward a more analytical approach would open the "black box" of college to help administrators design effective curriculums and guide the students who navigate them. 

“We are building a new science of academic progress that leverages ubiquitous student and course data with computational methods to understand sequences of choices in higher education,” Kizilcec said. “This will enable new ways to understand the choices students make in college, and provide more transparency and advice to students as they make these fateful decisions. It also provides insights for administrators as they make structural and curriculum changes.”

The problem with pipelines

“In science, metaphors guide our understanding of a problem — they shape our approach to observing the world and the way we communicate our findings,” said co-author Mitchell Stevens, a professor of education at Stanford. “The pipeline metaphor has been useful for many years, but it has come to limit our understanding of how academic progress unfolds.” 

If students enter college with one major in mind, but then switch, the pipeline metaphor treats that kind of departure as a “leak,” or a loss, rather than an entry onto another route to graduation. What’s more, a pipeline metaphor suggests a lack of agency on students’ part, the authors say, when in reality, students are making decisions throughout their education.

A switch to pathways could also help pave the way for interventions that promote equity, the authors write. 

"Pathways science can help demystify the college experience and shed light on the consequences of students’ choices," Kizilcec said. "This can especially benefit students who are first-generation or low-income, who may not have input from people with significant college experience."  

Applying new analytical techniques

In conjunction with a new conceptual model, recent developments in computational science make it possible to analyze complex data on academic progress, the authors write. 

Currently, colleges and universities have an often untapped trove of student data – grades, demographics, classes that students take or drop, and how long it takes to graduate. This data can be used to understand how students are making choices in a complex system and how the curriculum's structure could be adapted to accommodate student preferences.

The authors call for building a shared analytical framework and infrastructure, including a system for standardizing data across institutions, available as open-source analytic tools. These tools can be shared and applied across schools and university systems.

This work can also lead to better resources for advising students. One such tool is Pathways, a platform that helps students navigate a university’s curriculum to make more informed choices when selecting classes and majors, which was developed previously by Kizilcec’s group, the Future of Learning lab.

“Understanding the consequences of academic choices – picking courses, declaring majors – can be difficult," Kizilcec said. "A new approach that leverages available data along with machine learning and other tools can increase transparency in academic environments to help students make well-informed choices and help universities design curriculums that keep up with the future of work.”

The paper’s other authors are: Rachel B. Baker from the University of Pennsylvania; Elizabeth Bruch from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; Kalena E. Cortes from Texas A&M University; Laura T. Hamilton from the University of California at Merced; David Nathan Lang from Western Governors University; Zachary A. Pardos from the University of California at Berkeley, and Marissa E. Thompson from Columbia University. 

Adapted from materials provided by the Stanford Graduate School of Education.