Dozens of stakeholders responsible for the new building for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science penned their names onto a 20-foot steel beam that will soon buttress the building’s fourth floor at an April 23 event celebrating the ongoing construction.
At four stories and totaling some 135,000 square feet, the Cornell Bowers CIS building, located south of Gates Hall, is on schedule for completion in spring 2025. Construction began in spring 2023.
More than 300 people joined in two days of campus activities celebrating Cornell entrepreneurs April 11-12, including events to honor Tim Barry ’93 as the 2024 Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year.
Entrepreneurship at Cornell’s Celebration event also included speakers and events exploring everything from artificial intelligence to tech startup investing to building a more inclusive entrepreneurial community.
Richlove Nkansah ’26 was buzzing with excitement the week before spring break – she had just launched her business and was headed to California to pitch it to a group of Silicon Valley Cornell alumni and entrepreneurs.
Nkansah is the co-founder, with Harmony Prado ’24, of CultureCare, a digital platform for BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) therapists to manage their practice and connect to clients. They met during Nkansah’s first year, at the Engaged to Empower hackathon, where they worked to develop an idea focused on mental health related to children.
Researchers who develop social robots – ones that people interact with – focus too much on design features and not enough on sociological factors, like human-to-human interactions, the contexts where they happen and cultural norms involving robots, according to an award-winning paper from Cornell and Indiana University scholars who specialize in human-robot interaction.
Nicki Dell, associate professor, information and computer science, Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, co-founded (with Professor Tom Ristenpart) the Clinic to End Tech Abuse, a first-of-its-kind clinic to help survivors navigate technology abuse. The clinic was developed in partnership with the NYC Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence. Dell also helps to lead the Home Health Care Work Initiative in the ILR School Center on Applied Research on Work.
Beginning Fall 2024, Cornell undergraduates can minor in artificial intelligence (AI).
Offered by the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, the AI minor is intended for any undergraduates who anticipate AI playing a critical role in their academic and professional careers. Students will get a solid foundational understanding of the algorithms and techniques that underlie AI capabilities like machine learning, automated reasoning, natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics.
“The new minor presents another opportunity for all Big Red undergraduates to tap into Cornell’s leadership in AI and learn from world-class scholars who develop, critique, and refine AI systems for the greatest good,” said Claire Cardie, associate dean for education in Cornell Bowers CIS.
AI is poised to have a transformative impact on all disciplines and society more broadly, making education around AI essential, said Kavita Bala, dean of Cornell Bowers CIS and lead dean of the Cornell AI Initiative.
“Our students will graduate and live and work in an AI-enabled world. Education around AI is needed now more than ever, as AI becomes more powerful and ubiquitous in everyday life and as industries shift to hire talent to leverage it,” Bala said. “This minor serves students across campus, and across disciplines, who want to understand AI technology and apply it in other disciplines.”
To earn the AI minor, students must complete six courses: four required Foundations of AI core courses on machine learning, reasoning, human-AI interaction, and ethics, governance, and policy; and two electives. There are nearly 50 electives, including courses like Robot Learning (CS 4756), Text Mining History and Literature (INFO 3350), Statistical Computing (STSCI 4520), and dozens more.
Students with questions about the minor can contact ai-minor@cis.cornell.edu. Please note that while the AI minor was officially approved last May, it will become available to students starting Fall 2024.
By Louis DiPietro, a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.
Cornell researchers have developed two technologies that track a person’s gaze and facial expressions through sonar-like sensing.
The technology is small enough to fit on commercial smartglasses or virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) headsets, yet consumes significantly less power than similar tools using cameras.
Cornell researchers have developed a wristband device that continuously detects hand positioning – as well as objects the hand interacts with – using AI-powered, inaudible soundwaves.
Potential applications include tracking hand positions for virtual reality (VR) systems, controlling smartphones and other devices with hand gestures, and understanding a user’s activities; for example, a cooking app could narrate a recipe as the user chops, measures and stirs. The technology is small enough to fit onto a commercial smartwatch and lasts all day on a standard smartwatch battery.
EchoWrist is among the newest low-power, body pose-tracking technology from the Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab. Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science directs the lab.
“The hand is fundamentally important – whatever you do almost always involves hands,” Zhang said. “This device offers a solution that can continuously track your hand pose cheaply and also very accurately.”
Chi-Jung Lee and Ruidong Zhang, both doctoral students in the field of information science and co-first authors, will present the study, “EchoWrist: Continuous Hand Pose Tracking and Hand-Object Interaction Recognition Using Low-Power Active Acoustic Sensing On a Wristband,” at the Association of Computing Machinery CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’24), May 11-16.
EchoWrist also lets users control devices with gestures and give presentations. “We can enrich our interaction with a smartwatch or even other devices by allowing one-handed interaction – we could also remotely control our smartphone,” said Lee. “I can just use one-handed gestures to control my slides.”
This is the first time the lab has extended its tech beyond the body, said Ruidong Zhang. “EchoWrist not only tracks the hand itself, but also objects and the surrounding environment.”
The device uses two tiny speakers mounted on the top and underside of a wristband to bounce inaudible sound off the hand and any hand-held objects. Two nearby microphones pick up the echoes, which are interpreted by a microcontroller. A battery smaller than a quarter powers the device.
The team developed a type of artificial intelligence model inspired by neurons in the brain, called a neural network, to interpret a user’s hand posture based on the resulting echoes. To train the neural network, they compared echo profiles and videos of users making various gestures and reconstructed the positions of 20 hand joints based on the sound signals.
With help from 12 volunteers, the researchers tested how well EchoWrist detects objects such as a cup, chopsticks, water bottle, pot, pan and kettle, and actions like drinking, stirring, peeling, twisting, chopping and pouring. Overall, the device had 97.6% accuracy. This capability makes it possible for users to follow interactive recipes that track the cook’s progress and read out the next step – so cooks can avoid getting their screens dirty.
Unlike FingerTrak, a previous hand-tracking technology from the SciFi Lab that used cameras, EchoWrist is much smaller and consumes significantly less energy.
“An important added benefit of acoustic tracking is that it really enhances users’ privacy while providing a similar level of performance as camera tracking,” said co-author François Guimbretière, professor of information science in Cornell Bowers CIS and the multicollege Department of Design Tech.
The technology could be used to reproduce hand movements for VR applications. Existing VR and augmented reality systems accomplish this task using cameras mounted on the headset, but this approach uses a lot of power and can’t track the hands once they leave the headset’s limited field of view.
“One of the most exciting applications this technology would enable is to allow AI to understand human activities by tracking and interpreting the hand poses in everyday activities,” Cheng Zhang said.
Researchers noted however, that EchoWrist still struggled to distinguish between objects with highly similar shapes, such as a fork and a spoon. But the team is confident that the object recognition will improve as they refine the technology. With further optimization, they believe EchoWrist could easily be integrated into an existing off-the-shelf smartwatch.
Additional authors on the paper include Devansh Agarwal, an Ignite Fellow at Cornell’s Center for Technology Licensing; Tianhong Catherine Yu, Ke Li and Mose Sakashita, all doctoral students in the field of information science; undergraduates Vipin Gunda ’25, Oliver Lopez ’24 and James Kim ’25; Sicheng Yin, an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh; and Boao Dong ’23, M.Eng. ’23.
Funding for the project is from the National Science Foundation.
Patricia Waldron is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.
The Kessler Fellows program recently welcomed 20 students to its 2024 cohort. The students will spend their spring semesters sharpening their entrepreneurial skills while preparing for a fully funded summer internship at a startup of their choice.
Students from all walks of Cornell with an interest in entrepreneurship are encouraged to apply to the Kessler Fellows program, which only requires applicants be a junior in standing. The program provides the opportunity for students to build their entrepreneurial skills, experience and professional network throughout their summer internship.
