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.

$10M gift to Cornell Bowers supports AI advancement

A $10 million gift from Josh Kulkin ’01 to the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Sciences will bolster the university’s position as a world leader in foundational artificial intelligence research.

Student draws on experience to transform assistive communication

At 15, Tobias Weinberg lost the ability to speak – now as a Ph.D. student at Cornell Tech, he’s using AI to improve the technologies he and others with speech disabilities rely on to communicate.

Bezos grant to fund AI innovations to monitor and protect wildlife

A $1.8 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund will help the Cornell Lab of Ornithology develop acoustic sensors and artificial intelligence analytics to identify real-time threats to forests from illegal activities and provide insights into ecosystem health.

Cornell Tech Hosts First-Ever Summit on Disability, Access, and AI

Cornell Tech hosted the inaugural Disability and Access in Tech and AI Summit on Oct. 9-10 on its Roosevelt Island campus, bringing together researchers, technologists, and community advocates to explore how disability and accessibility intersect with innovation. The summit welcomed speakers, students, faculty, alumni, and community members from Cornell’s Ithaca campus, New York City, and around the United States.

Faculty innovate with, and avoid, AI in the classroom

At the same time faculty are finding ways to use generative AI tools to help students learn, pen-and-paper assessments are returning to the classroom.

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

$10M gift to Cornell Bowers supports AI advancement

Nov 13, 2025 | Featured, News

A $10 million gift from Josh Kulkin ’01 to the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Sciences will bolster the university’s position as a world leader in foundational artificial intelligence research.

Professor Vitaly Shmatikov Wins Test of Time Award for Deep Learning Research

Nov 13, 2025 | Machine Learning, News

Vitaly Shmatikov, professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, has received the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS) Test of Time Award for his influential 2015 paper, “Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning.”

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Cornell AI Events

The Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media
November 13 @ 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Please join us for this Chats in the Stacks book talk, for a discussion of the recent research described in this important new book and the implications it suggests for us as individuals and the families, communities, and societies in which we live.

All AI Events

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.