Date Posted: 5/01/2023

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded three doctoral students in computer science its 2023 Graduate Research Fellowship: Sidhika Balachandar, Emily Ryu, and Yihong Sun. 

NSF makes these awards "to ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States." Fellows receive a three-year stipend and tuition assistance, as well as access to career development activities. Additionally, the program provides opportunities for people belonging to groups currently underrepresented in STEM fields, including women, minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans. 

Balachandar, a first-year doctoral student advised by Emma Pierson and Nikhil Garg, is using machine learning and statistical models to detect bias in medical decision making. 

Ryu, a second-year doctoral student advised by Éva Tardos and Jon Kleinberg, is broadly interested in theoretical computer science, especially algorithmic game theory, mechanism design, and networks. Her current work has applications for diversifying recommender systems.

Sun, a first-year doctoral student advised by Bharath Hariharan, is interested in computer vision and machine learning, especially in building vision algorithms that can learn with minimal supervision and generalize to "unseen domains" – images that are different from those used to train the algorithm.

Noam Zilberstein, also a doctoral student in computer science, advised by Alexandra Silva, received an honorable mention.

The three Cornell Bowers CIS members are among the 68 graduate students at Cornell who will receive the award this year, joining a community of more than 200 current fellows at the university. 

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