Department Directory

Sanjiban Choudhury is an assistant professor of computer science and works on interactive AI agents that self-align through few-shot interactions with humans and their environment. His research focuses on reinforcement learning (RLHF), imitation learning (IRL), and foundation models for planning, robotics, and code generation. He also leads the PoRTaL group, which builds everyday robots for everyday users and has a mission to make robots accessible, user-friendly, and practical for tasks from cooking to cleaning. Choudhury did his postdoctoral research at the University of Washington and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. 

Tanzeem Choudhury is a Professor in Computing and Information Sciences at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, where she holds the Roger and Joelle Burnell Chair in Integrated Health and Technology. At Cornell, Tanzeem directs the People-Aware Computing group and leads the Precision Behavioral Health Initiative, focused on advancing the future of technology-assisted well-being. Tanzeem co-founded HealthRhythms Inc, a company whose mission is to add the layer of behavioral health into all of healthcare. She is also the Senior Vice President of Digital Health at Optum Labs. Prior to Cornell, Tanzeem was an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Dartmouth College. Tanzeem received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory.

Michael Clarkson is teaching-track faculty in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. In 2022, after a decade of teaching a total of about 6,000 students, he received the university’s highest annual teaching award for teaching-track faculty and was appointed as a Provost’s Teaching Fellow, which is a permanent designation. He is best known for his open-source textbook on OCaml programming, which is used at Cornell and elsewhere. His accompanying YouTube channel on functional programming has received more than a million views from around the world. He also teaches courses on object-oriented programming, formal verification, computer security, and data science. Clarkson received his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell. 

Professor Constable stepped down as the Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University, serving from 1999 - 2009. CIS is a college-level unit created to advance Cornell’s academic and research initiative in computing and information science. Professor Constable was formerly chairman of Cornell’s Computer Science Department for six years.

Alex Conway is an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Preston Culbertson draws on machine learning, computer vision, and control theory to develop robots that move like humans. Prior to joining Cornell, he was a research scientist at The AI Institute in Cambridge, Mass. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.

Anil Damle is an associate professor of computer science. His research focuses on the development and analysis of robust and efficient algorithms in applied and computational mathematics that exploit structure coming from underlying physical or statistical models. He interfaces with a broad range of application areas and his work is inherently interdisciplinary – with the ultimate goal of developing algorithms that are usable for practitioners. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in computational and mathematical engineering, and his M.A. in applied mathematics and B.S. in applied mathematics and computer engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil is an associate professor of information science. His research aims at developing computational frameworks that can lead to a better understanding of human social behavior by unlocking the unprecedented potential of the large amounts of natural language data generated online. His awards and honors include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Google Research Faculty Award, and numerous Best Paper awards. His work has been featured in popular media outlets such as the New Scientist, NBC's The Today Show, NPR, BBC, WIRED, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. For publications, recent updates and more fun stuff, check out Cristian's webpage.

Abe Davis is an assistant professor of computer science who specializes in computer graphics, computer vision, and human-computer interaction (HCI). His group brings these areas together to work on new problems at the intersection of different disciplines. Davis completed postdoctoral research at Stanford University and Cornell Tech, and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying electrical engineering and computer science. He earned his undergraduate degree in computer science at Stanford.

Christopher De Sa is an associate professor of computer science and a member of the Cornell Machine Learning Group where he leads the Relax ML Lab. His research interests include algorithmic, software, and hardware techniques for high-performance machine learning, with a focus on relaxed-consistency variants of stochastic algorithms such as asynchronous and low-precision stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Markov chain Monte Carlo. His work builds towards using these techniques to construct data analytics and machine learning frameworks, including for deep learning, that are efficient, parallel, and distributed. De Sa received his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from Stanford University in electrical engineering.

Sarah Dean is an assistant professor of computer science. She studies the interplay between optimization, machine learning, and dynamics in real-world systems. Her research focuses on understanding the fundamentals of data-driven methods for control and decision-making, inspired by applications ranging from robotics to recommendation systems. She completed her postdoctoral research at the University of Washington and earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Dean received her B.S.E. in electrical engineering and mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Nicola Dell is an associate professor of information science at Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. She advises Ph.D. and M.S. students in the fields of information science and computer science.

Saikat Dutta is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests are at the intersection of software engineering and machine learning, with a particular focus on developing software testing and debugging techniques to improve the reliability of machine learning-based systems. He is also exploring how to leverage the latest machine learning techniques to solve software engineering problems. Dutta completed his postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania and received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from Jadavpur University.

Raaz Dwivedi joined Department of Operations Research and Information Engineering and Cornell Tech at Cornell University as an Assistant Professor in Jan 2024. Prior to that, he visited Cornell ORIE in Fall 2023 and spent two years as a FODSI postdoc fellow at Harvard and MIT LIDS, and spent a summer at Microsoft Research New England. He did his Ph. D. In EECS at UC Berkeley in 2021 and bachelors in EE at IIT Bombay in 2014. His research builds statistically and computationally efficient strategies for personalized decision-making with theory and methods spanning the areas of causal inference, reinforcement learning, and distribution compression. He has won a best student paper award for work on optimal compression and teaching awards at UC Berkeley and Harvard.

Matthew Eichhorn is a lecturer of computer science who leads large undergraduate courses on discrete mathematics and programming. His research focuses on developing tools to inform decisions with societal implications. This ranges from developing algorithms for online team formation, finding ways to fairly distribute goods in settings such as public health and education where the normative allocation criteria are often at odds, and using statistical tools from causal inference to estimate the effectiveness of an intervention that propagates through a social interference network. 

Ahmed El Alaoui is an assistant professor of statistics and data science. His research interests revolve around high-dimensional phenomena in statistics and probability theory, statistical physics, algorithms, and problems where these areas meet. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty in 2021, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, hosted by Andrea Montanari. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley in 2018, advised by Michael I. Jordan. 

Kevin Ellis is an assistant professor of computer science. He works on program synthesis and neurosymbolic AI. Ellis earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science and his B.S. in physics with a concentration in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Deborah Estrin is the Robert V. Tishman ’37 professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. At Cornell Tech, she serves as the Associate Dean for Impact. She is also an affiliate faculty member at Weill Cornell Medicine.