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.

Pupil size in sleep reveals how memories are sorted and preserved

By studying mice equipped with brain electrodes and tiny eye-tracking cameras, Cornell researchers determined that new memories are being replayed and consolidated when the pupil is contracted during a substage of non-REM sleep.

In American fiction, it’s a small world after all

Despite being unbound by space and time, fictional protagonists in American literature travel fewer miles than their nonfiction counterparts, according to a Cornell-led research team that used artificial intelligence to analyze nearly 13,500 books from the last 230 years.

Xiaoying Gan ’25: Using data to transform the future of food

Xiaoying Gan ’25, a biometry and statistics and plant science double major, is using her Cornell Bowers education to improve agriculture and tackle food insecurity—advancing humanity and society through tech.

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.

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

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

Marine herbivores chomp eelgrass, making it susceptible to wasting

Feb 5, 2025 | News, Scientific Discovery

In two new papers, Cornell plant-herbivore experts and researchers from the Cornell Institute for Computational Sustainability joined forces to show the significant impacts of herbivores like sea snails on the spread of seagrass wasting disease. Grazing by small herbivores was associated with a 29% increase in the prevalence of disease, which contributes to huge losses in meadow areas from San Diego to Alaska.

New Cornell Projects Leap Forward with Generative AI Tools

Jan 30, 2025 | Events, News

Cornell’s AI Initiative supports university faculty, staff, and students as they explore models to optimize the use of generative AI for practical purposes. Eight local teams stunned a hybrid audience with presentations proving generative AI applications could simplify and solve problems that previously required intense manual effort. Each project team was led by one or two faculty or staff members and supported by students from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Cornell Bowers CIS).

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Cornell AI Events

Cornell Learning Machines Seminar
February 13 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
The Cornell Learning Machines Seminar is a semi-monthly seminar held at the Cornell Tech campus in New York City. The seminar focuses on machine learning and related areas, including Natural Language Processing, Vision, and Robotics.

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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.