Highlighting researchers who push the boundaries of their fields.

This distinguished lecture series honors the late Gerard Salton, computer science professor and leading scientist in the field of information retrieval, and is generously supported by Amit Singhal, PhD '97.

A towering figure in the field of information retrieval, Gerard Salton synthesized ideas from mathematics, statistics, and natural language processing to create a scientific basis for extracting semantics from word frequency. The impact of his contribution is profound - five textbooks, over 150 research papers, and dozens of Ph.D. students. The modern information science research scene, with its terabyte databases, Web, and related technologies, owes a great deal to Gerry's pioneering efforts.

Event Archive

Browse past lectures. If you wish to view an event listing prior to 2023, please email comm-office [at] cis.cornell.edu.

10.24.24: An Overview of High Performance Computing and Responsibly Reckless Algorithms

  • Speaker: Jack Dongarra
  • Abstract: In this talk we examine how high performance computing has changed over the last 10-year and look toward the future in terms of trends. These changes have had and will continue to have a major impact on our software.  Some of the software and algorithm challenges have already been encountered, such as management of communication and memory hierarchies through a combination of compile--time and run-time techniques, but the increased scale of computation, depth of memory hierarchies, range of latencies, and increased run--time environment variability will make these problems much harder. 
  • Host: Giulia Guidi

10.05.24: What We See and What We Value: AI With a Human Perspective

  • Speaker: : Dr. Fei-Fei Li
  • Abstract: IDr. Fei-Fei Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. She served as the Director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. And during her sabbatical from Stanford from January 2017 to September 2018, Dr. Li was Vice President at Google and served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. Since then she has served as a Board member or advisor in various public or private companies. 
  • Host: Kavita Bala