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Cornell AI Initiative

Leading the way in artificial intelligence research

Cornell’s AI Initiative is a university-wide radical collaboration designed to deepen opportunities in the development and application of AI within the field, and across AI-related, and AI-influenced fields.

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Cornell AI Initiative

AI boosts indoor food production’s energy sustainability

Integrating artificial intelligence into today’s environmental control systems could reduce energy consumption for indoor agriculture by 25% – potentially helping to feed the world as its population rises, Cornell engineers have found.

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Biohybrid robots controlled by electrical impulses — in mushrooms

Cornell researchers discovered a new way of controlling biohybrid robots that can react to their environment better than their purely synthetic counterparts: harnessing fungal mycelia’s innate electrical signals.

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Digital Artist Dreams His Creations in Pixels and Neurons

An architecture and computer graphics alum returned to the Hill this summer to draw images from landscapes—and memories

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Rev: Ithaca Startup Works puts new entrepreneurs through their paces

Over 10 weeks this summer, Rev’s Prototyping Hardware Accelerator guided product teams from back-of-the-napkin ideas to fully-fledged startups. In categories from climate technology to agricultural innovations, and with projects that range from canoe racing tools to improved tea dispensers, teams gained access to experts in their industry’s field, working together to figure out if their concept might be commercially desirable, technologically feasible and economically viable.

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A Radical Collaboration

Cornell’s AI Initiative is a university-wide radical collaboration designed to deepen opportunities in the development and application of AI within the field, and across AI-related, and AI-influenced fields.

Research happening across the Ithaca campus, as well as with Cornell Tech and Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, is bringing AI, machine learning, and data science to bear in areas and applications including: sustainable agriculture; improved urban design and infrastructure; and personalized, precision medicine and health.

In addition, Cornell is leveraging its strengths in philosophy, ethics, fairness and public policy to not only shape, investigate and utilize AI, but also to consider its profound ramifications on society.

Our vision of AI is one that tightly integrates the development of algorithmic AI capabilities with how AI technology engages with humans, society, and applications.

Cornell AI News

Cornell AI Events

Cornell AI News

Disclose invisible disabilities in social VR? It depends

Nov 6, 2024 |

Social virtual reality games and apps such as VRChat, AltspaceVR and Rec Room are immersive 3D experiences that let people with disabilities – both visible and invisible – try activities that might not be available to them in the non-virtual world.

In those settings, Cornell researchers have found, the decision to disclose an invisible disability – a physical, mental or neurological condition that is not visible from the outside but can limit or challenge a person’s movements, senses or activities – is personal.

New algorithm picks fairer shortlist when applicants abound

Nov 4, 2024 | ,

Cornell researchers developed a more equitable method for choosing top candidates from a large applicant pool in cases where insufficient information makes it hard to choose.

While humans still make many high-stakes decisions – like who should get a job, admission to college or a spot in a clinical trial – artificial intelligence (AI) models are increasingly used to narrow down the applicants into a manageable shortlist.

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Cornell AI Events

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All AI News
All AI Events

Meet the experts

Cornell researchers working on AI reflect its all-encompassing nature. Through science, scholarship, innovation and entrepreneurialism they are working to advance the development of algorithmic AI capabilities as well as studying how AI technology engages with humans, society, and applications.

These are some of Cornell’s leaders in the field of AI.

Leadership Team

Thorsten Joachims

College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell Bowers CIS, Cornell Engineering

Search engines and recommender systems have become the dominant matchmaker for a wide range of human endeavors. Consequently, they carry substantial power in shaping markets and allocating opportunity to the participants. Joachims’ research focuses on how the machine learning algorithms underlying these systems can produce unfair ranking policies for both exogenous and endogenous reasons.

Focus areas: Machine Learning, Reasoning, Society & Institutions

Recent research: Fairer ranking system diversifies search results

Deborah Estrin

Cornell Bowers CIS, Cornell Tech

Estrin is a health tech pioneer and directs Cornell Tech’s Small Data Lab, where researchers develop platforms and applications for management and use of personal data, such as using retrospective data to generate personalized models that can detect changes in health in response to treatment or disease progression.

Focus areas: Ethics, Law, and Policy, Health and Medicine, Machine Learning, Scientific Discovery

Recent research: Estrin, health tech pioneer, wins von Neumann medal

Jesse Goldberg

College of Arts and Sciences

To distinguish general principles from behavior-, effector-, and species-specific solutions to motor control problems, Goldberg studies vocal communication and social interaction in both songbirds and parrots, two species with distinct behaviors, learning capacities and neural circuitry.

Focus areas: Health and Medicine, Machine Learning

Recent research: Fruit flies use two muscles to control pitch for stable flight

Hadas Kress-Gazit

Cornell Engineering

Her research focuses on formal methods for robotics and automation and more specifically on creating verifiable robot controllers for complex high-level tasks using logic, verification, synthesis, hybrid systems theory and computational linguistics.

Focus areas: Autonomous Systems, Machine Learning

Recent research: Soft robots use camera and shadows to sense human touch

Carla Gomes

Cornell Bowers CIS, Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management

Gomes is a pioneer in AI for materials discovery, an area she has worked in for more than a decade. She is also credited with founding and developing the field of computational sustainability with impactful AI applications in ecology, species conservation, environmental sustainability and materials discovery for clean energy.

Focus areas: Scientific Discovery, Society & Institutions

Recent research: AI enables strategic hydropower planning across Amazon basin; DRNets can solve Sudoku, speed scientific discovery

Join Us

The AI Radical Collaboration provides enhanced startup packages, bridge funding, as well as general recruiting support and coordination to hire outstanding candidates for all Cornell colleges in both Ithaca and NYC.

Read more about opportunities.

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