Department Directory

Hakim Weatherspoon is a professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests cover various aspects of information systems, distributed systems, network systems, and peer-to-peer systems. In these areas, he particularly focuses on fault-tolerance, reliability, security, and performance of internet-scale systems with decentralized – autonomous, federated, multi-organizational, and cooperative – control. 

Kilian Weinberger is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in machine learning under the supervision of Lawrence Saul, and his undergraduate degree in mathematics and computing from the University of Oxford. In 2011 he was awarded the Outstanding AAAI Senior Program Chair Award and in 2012 he received an NSF CAREER award. He is the recipient of the Daniel M. Lazar '29 Excellence in Teaching Award (2016) and the Ann S. Bowers Teaching and Advising Excellence Award (2024). As of 2024, he is an ACM and AAAI fellow and in 2021 became a Blavatnik National Awards Finalist. Since 2024 he has been a member of the Sloan Research Fellowships Selection Committee. Weinberger's research focuses on machine learning and its applications. In particular, he has worked on learning under resource constraints, metric learning, AI in science, computer vision, autonomous vehicles, Gaussian processes, and deep learning. Before joining Cornell University, he was an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and before that, he worked as a research scientist at Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara. 

Walker White is a senior lecturer of computer science and a Stephen H. Weiss Provost's Teaching Fellow. A mathematical logician by training, White studied computable model theory for his thesis work, and then moved onto the design of high-level languages for databases and information systems. More recently, White has combined his professional research in databases and query languages with his hobbies in gaming and game design. He is the director of the Game Design Initiative at Cornell, which he helped launch in 2001 as one of the first official computer game programs of its kind and the first such program established at an Ivy League university. In his role as director, he leads Cornell’s undergraduate minor in game design. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics and a master’s in computer science from Cornell, and a bachelor’s in mathematics from Dartmouth.

David Williamson was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but grew up in the suburbs of Honolulu, Hawaii. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  In 1995 he joined IBM Research, and from 2000-2003 was the Senior Manager of the Computer Science Principles and Methodologies Department at IBM's Almaden Research Center.  In 2004, he joined Cornell University as a professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, and the Faculty of Computing and Information Science.

Dr. Williamson is well-known for his work on the topic of approximation algorithms, and is a coauthor of the book "The Design of Approximation Algorithms", published by Cambridge University Press. His Ph.D. dissertation on designing low-cost survivable networks was awarded several prizes, including the 1996 SIAM DiPrima Prize and the 1994 Tucker Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society. His work with Michel Goemans on the uses of semidefinite programming in approximation algorithms was awarded the 1999 SIAM Activity Group on Optimization prize, and the 2000 Fulkerson Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society. He is the editor-in-chief for the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, and has served as an associate editor on several other journals, including Mathematics of Operations Research and the SIAM Journal on Computing.
 

Qian Yang is an assistant professor of information science. She is a human-AI interaction designer and researcher. With her students, Yang designs novel AI applications and services that demonstrate new ways of bridging together frontier AI technologies, user needs, and societal betterment goals. For this work, she has received many academic and industry awards, including Schmidt Futures' Inaugural AI2050 Fellowship. She co-directs the Cornell Digital and AI Literacy Initiative with Natalie Bazarova. Yang is also a senior fellow at the Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Institute.

Ramin Zabih is a Professor at Cornell Tech and in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. He received his undergraduate degrees from MIT in Computer Science and Math, and his Ph.D. from Stanford in Computer Science.

Cheng Zhang is an associate professor of information science. His research examines how to solicit information on and around the human body to address real-world challenges in various application areas, such as interaction, health sensing, and activity recognition. He usually builds novel sensing systems from the bottom to the top, including understanding the physical phenomenon, building hardware prototypes, designing form factors, processing data, and designing algorithms (machine learning or physics-based modeling).