Department Directory

Rajalakshmi Nandakumar is an Assistant Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the Information Science department at Cornell University. She received her Ph.D. from University of Washington in Computer Science and Engineering in 2019. Her research focuses on developing wireless sensing technologies that enable novel applications in various domains including mobile health, user interfaces and IoT networks. She developed the first contactless smartphone-based sleep apnea diagnosis system that was licensed by ResMed Inc. and now used by millions of users for sleep staging. She was recognized with the UW Medicine Judy Su Clinical Research award, Paul Baran Young Scholar award by the Marconi Society and also named as the rising star in EECS by MIT.

Andrew Owens is an associate professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. His research aims to create multimodal systems that learn to see, hear, and touch without human-labeled training data. Instead, these systems learn from co-occurring sensory signals, such as the correlations between the visual and audio streams of a video. His work has enabled applications that include producing soundtracks for silent videos, robotic manipulation with vision and touch, detecting AI-generated images, and generating visual illusions.

Rafael Pass is a Professor at Cornell Tech and in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. He obtained his bachelor’s in Engineering Physics and a master’s in Computer Science, both from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in 2006. He has been on the faculty of Cornell University since 2006 and joined Cornell Tech in 2013.

Thomas Ristenpart is a professor at Cornell Tech and a member of the computer science department at Cornell University. Before joining Cornell Tech in May 2015, he spent four and a half years as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, in 2010, and his M.S. at the University of California, Davis, in 2005.

Sasha Rush is an associate professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. His research interests are in the study of language models with applications in controllable text generation, efficient inference, and summarization and information extraction. Rush is a member of Cornell’s Natural Language Processing Group, which aims to build and improve language models.

Adrian Sampson is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He works on programming languages, computer architecture, and the abstractions that separate them. He is especially excited about languages and compilers that make it easy for anyone to construct and exploit specialized hardware accelerators. In a different era, he worked on approximate computing, the idea that we should design computers that compute worse answers.

Fred B. Schneider is the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He joined Cornell's faculty in Fall 1978 and served as department chair from 2014-2018. His Ph.D. (1978) is from Stony Brook University, having completed a B.S. in engineering at Cornell in 1975.

Bart Selman is a professor of computer science at Cornell University. Previously, he was at AT&T Bell Laboratories. His research interests include computational sustainability, efficient reasoning procedures, planning, knowledge representation, and connections between computer science and statistical physics. He has (co-)authored more than 100 publications, including six best paper awards. His papers have appeared in venues spanning Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and a variety of conferences and journals in AI and computer science. He has received the Cornell Stephen Miles Excellence in Teaching Award, the Cornell Outstanding Educator Award, an NSF Career Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Phoebe Sengers is a professor in the Departments of Information Science and Science & Technology Studies (STS), a graduate field member in computer science, associate faculty with the Department of Art, and a member of the Cornell Initiative for Digital Agriculture. Her primary research fields are human-computer interaction and science & technology studies. Her work integrates ethnographic and historical analysis of the social implications of technology with design methods to suggest alternative future possibilities. At Cornell, she leads the Culturally Embedded Computing research group, which explores rural, working-class and global South experiences of technologies, traces the emerging entanglements between people and data, and uses design to speculate about alternative pasts and futures.

Vitaly Shmatikov is a professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Before Cornell, he worked at the University of Texas at Austin and SRI International. His research areas include digital privacy, computer security, and security and privacy issues in machine learning.

David Shmoys obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984, and held postdoctoral positions at MSRI in Berkeley and Harvard University, and a faculty position at MIT before joining the Cornell faculty. He is Co-Chair of the Academic Planning Committee for Cornell Tech and Associate Director of the Institute of Computational Sustainability at Cornell University.

He is a Fellow of the ACM, INFORMS, and of SIAM, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and has served on numerous editorial boards, including Mathematics of Operations Research (for which he is currently an Associate Editor), Operations Research, ORSA Journal on Computing, Mathematical Programming, and the SIAM Journals of both Computing and Discrete Mathematics, where for the latter he also served as Editor-in-Chief. He has been the advisor for 21 graduated Ph.D. students, and his former students are currently on the faculties of many leading universities and research labs, including MIT, Waterloo, Brown, Maryland, Georgetown, and D-Wave.

Shmoys' research has focused on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for discrete optimization problems, with applications including scheduling, inventory theory, computational biology, and most recently, comptuational sustainability. His work has highlighted the central role that linear programming plays in the design of approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems; his recent book, co-authored with David Williamson), The Design of Approximation Algorithms, was awarded the 2013 Lanchester Prize by INFORMS.
 

Alexandra Silva is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Before joining the faculty at Cornell, she was a Royal Society Wolfson Fellow and Professor of Algebra, Semantics, and Computation at the Programming Principles, Logic and Verification Group, University College London.

Rachee Singh is an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University where she leads the sysphotonics group. Her group develops systems and algorithms for efficient communication on server-scale, rack-scale, and long-haul photonic interconnects. We use these systems to improve the performance of important applications like distributed machine learning and general planet-scale cloud workloads.

Noah Snavely is a professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Snavely’s research interests are in computer vision and graphics, in particular, recovering structure from large photo collections for use in understanding and visualizing the world around us.

Nicholas Spooner is an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University and a member of the Theory of Computing group. His work focuses on post-quantum proof systems. His interests include probabilistic proof systems and zero knowledge in general, post-quantum cryptography, quantum information, coding theory, and computational complexity.