Department Directory

Angelina Wang is an assistant professor of information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Her research is in the area of responsible AI.

Matthew Wilkens is the associated dean of education and an associate professor of information science. He uses quantitative and computational methods to study large-scale developments in literary and cultural history. His work has focused in particular on literary text mining, geolocation extraction, genre detection, and the cross-pollination of critical and social scientific methods. He also seeks to develop and apply natural language processing and artificial intelligence methods to large-scale datasets in domains including medicine, public health, economics, and the law.

David Williamson was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but grew up in the suburbs of Honolulu, Hawaii. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  In 1995 he joined IBM Research, and from 2000-2003 was the Senior Manager of the Computer Science Principles and Methodologies Department at IBM's Almaden Research Center.  In 2004, he joined Cornell University as a professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, and the Faculty of Computing and Information Science.

Dr. Williamson is well-known for his work on the topic of approximation algorithms, and is a coauthor of the book "The Design of Approximation Algorithms", published by Cambridge University Press. His Ph.D. dissertation on designing low-cost survivable networks was awarded several prizes, including the 1996 SIAM DiPrima Prize and the 1994 Tucker Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society. His work with Michel Goemans on the uses of semidefinite programming in approximation algorithms was awarded the 1999 SIAM Activity Group on Optimization prize, and the 2000 Fulkerson Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society. He is the editor-in-chief for the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, and has served as an associate editor on several other journals, including Mathematics of Operations Research and the SIAM Journal on Computing.
 

Qian Yang is an assistant professor of information science. She is a human-AI interaction designer and researcher. With her students, Yang designs novel AI applications and services that demonstrate new ways of bridging together frontier AI technologies, user needs, and societal betterment goals. For this work, she has received many academic and industry awards, including Schmidt Futures' Inaugural AI2050 Fellowship. She co-directs the Cornell Digital and AI Literacy Initiative with Natalie Bazarova. Yang is also a senior fellow at the Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Institute.

Yian Yin is an assistant professor of information science. His research applies and develops novel computational tools to understand how individual, social, and environmental processes independently and jointly promote (or inhibit) scientific progress and innovation achievements. As a computational social scientist, he has also used science and innovation as a powerful lens to examine broader processes and outcomes in a wide range of complex social processes, from artistic and cultural productions to public policy, from media attention to market competition to human conflict. His research has been published in top general audience venues such as Science, Nature, and Nature Human Behaviour and featured in media outlets such as Forbes, Scientific American, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, and MIT Technology Review. In 2023, he was named to Forbes 30 under 30: Science list.

Cheng Zhang is an associate professor of information science. His research examines how to solicit information on and around the human body to address real-world challenges in various application areas, such as interaction, health sensing, and activity recognition. He usually builds novel sensing systems from the bottom to the top, including understanding the physical phenomenon, building hardware prototypes, designing form factors, processing data, and designing algorithms (machine learning or physics-based modeling).  

Dr. Kaitlyn Zhou is an incoming professor at Cornell University in the Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Her contributions have been recognized at top-tier conferences in NLP and HCI. She has received awards such as NAACL Best Paper Runner-Up, MIT EECS Rising Star, Stanford Graduate Fellowship, and the College of Engineering Dean’s Medal and her methods have been featured in high-profile news outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Kaitlyn received her PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University where she was advised by Dan Jurafsky. Kaitlyn has long advocated for increased access, inclusion, and equity in higher education and was appointed by the Washington State Governor to serve on the University of Washington Board of Regents.