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.

Ann S. Bowers ’59, a pioneering technology industry executive and longtime philanthropist whose transformational gift established the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, died Jan. 24 at her home in Palo Alto, California. Bowers was 86.

My tenure as the director of information technology policy at Cornell University coincided with the copyright wars. That is what I used to call them, when technology ran ahead of the creative market—notably in literature, movies and music.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) has elected Claire Cardie, associate dean for education in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering and professor of computer science and information science, and Kilian Weinberger, professor of computer science, as AAAI Fellows for 2024.

Each year, AAAI selects a cohort of fellows “who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence,” often over the course of a decade. Cardie and Weinberger are among this year’s 12 AAAI Fellows who will be celebrated at an awards ceremony during the AAAI-24 meeting, held Feb. 22 to 25 in Vancouver.

Cardie is being honored for her research on natural language processing (NLP), in which she aims to develop algorithms and systems that make it easier to locate, understand and extract information from text on the internet. Her group employs machine learning (ML) techniques, such as neural networks, as a modeling tool. They develop techniques both to accomplish large-scale NLP tasks and to address underlying theoretical problems in analyzing human language.

“I am honored and excited to join the growing cohort of AAAI fellows in the computer science department,” Cardie said.

Previously, Cardie was elected a AAAS Fellow in 2022, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2019 and a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2015. She was also a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award and the Ralph S. Watts College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award.

Weinberger is recognized for his contribution to ML and deep learning research. Applications of his work include autonomous driving, computer vision, Gaussian processes and the development of more cost-effective ML systems.

“I am very honored,” Weinberger said.

In addition to the current honor, Weinberger was a Blavatnik National Awards Finalist in 2021. He received the Daniel M Lazar '29 Excellence in Teaching Award in 2016 and an NSF CAREER award in 2012. Weinberger is also the current president of the International Machine Learning Society.

Cardie and Weinberger are the newest Cornell Bowers CIS faculty to be named AAAI Fellows. They join Thorsten Joachims, professor of computer science and information science; Lillian Lee, the Charles Roy Davis Professor of computer science and professor of information science; Carla Gomes, the Ronald C. and Antonia V. Nielsen Professor of Computing and Information Science; Bart Selman, professor of computer science; and Joseph Halpern, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering and professor of computer science.

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

A consortium aiming to make New York a global leader in artificial intelligence would help Cornell play a role in shaping the future of AI, promote responsible research and development, create jobs and unlock opportunities focused on public good.

Ask ChatGPT to find a well-known poem and it will probably regurgitate the entire text verbatim – regardless of copyright law – according to a new study by Cornell researchers.

The study showed that ChatGPT, a large language model that generates text on demand, was capable of “memorizing” poems, especially famous ones commonly found online. The findings pose ethical questions about how ChatGPT and other proprietary artificial intelligence models are trained – likely using data scraped from the internet, researchers said.

Cornell University has joined a new Action Collaborative on Transforming Trajectories for Women of Color in Tech, launched by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine along with 34 other institutions representing higher education, national laboratories and government.