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Dear Bowers community,
As we step into fall, it’s inspiring to see Gates and the new Computing and Information Science Building buzzing with life and purpose. This is a busy time of year — schedules are full, workloads are heavy — and I encourage you to prioritize self-care and lean on the support of our community and Cornell’s many resources. I also hope the upcoming break offers you rest, renewal, and time with loved ones.
October marks my final month as interim dean. Serving in this role has been a true privilege, and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to work alongside such a vibrant and dedicated community. I’m excited to welcome Sorin Lerner into the role and to focus more on the Cornell AI Initiative.
Cheers,
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Thorsten Joachims
Interim Dean
Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science
dean@bowers.cornell.edu
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Marschner named associate dean for research
Steve Marschner, Ph.D. '98, professor of computer science, has been named the next associate dean for research of the college, starting Nov. 1. Marschner succeeds Nate Foster, professor of computer science, who has held the position since November 2024.
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Faculty innovate with, and avoid, AI in the classroom
“There is a recognition that generative AI brings both good and harms to the classroom environment, some really fantastic opportunities and advances for faculty work and for student learning, and also some very real and deep challenges.”
– Steven Jackson, vice provost for academic innovation and chair of the Cornell GenAI Education Working Group
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Bowers faculty featured in CTI's teaching showcase
The Center for Teaching Innovation’s “What Works: Creating Engaging Learning Experiences,” a teaching showcase featuring faculty presentations and poster sessions, is designed to share creative teaching experiences and how they impact students.
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The college awards honor exemplary faculty and staff
The Cornell Bowers community celebrated four faculty recognized for their excellence in research and five faculty recognized for excellence in teaching and advising in a ceremony held Sept. 26 in Gates Hall.
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Jelena Bradic
Bradic is a professor of statistics and data science. Before joining Cornell, she held positions at the University of California, San Diego, in both the Department of Mathematics and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute.
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Preston Culbertson
Culbertson is an assistant professor of computer science. Previously, he was a research scientist at the Robotics and AI Institute in Cambridge, Mass. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.
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Benjamin Shestakofsky
Shestakofsky is an assistant professor of information science. Before joining Cornell, he was an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Supporting students and their futures
Meet Vipin Gunda ’25, former Milstein Scholar in Technology and Humanity, Nexus Research Scholar, Rawlings Presidential Research Scholar, and Laidlaw Research Scholar.
| | | | | The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Alexandra Silva, professor of computer science, two $900,000 grants for projects related to verification of networks and software that exploits concurrency and randomness. | | | |
Faculty Award Winners:
Yoav Artzi
Volodymyr Kuleshov
Jennifer Sun
Dana Yang
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Student Award Winners:
Dhruv Agarwal
Eric Enouen
Byungsoo Oh
Linxi Zhao
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AI can write your college essay, but it won’t sound like you
AJ Alvero, Thorsten Joachims, Rene Kizilcec, and doctoral student Jinsook Lee compared 30,000 college application essays written by humans to ones written by eight popular large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT. Even when they specified a person’s race, gender, and geographic location in the prompt, the models spit out highly uniform text that was easy to distinguish from actual human writing.
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‘Bottling’ human intuition for AI-led materials discovery
Many properties of the world’s most advanced materials are beyond the reach of quantitative modeling. Understanding them also requires a human expert’s reasoning and intuition, which can’t be replicated by even the most powerful AI, mixed with fortuitous accident, said Eun-Ah Kim, the Hans A. Bethe Professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences.
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New book mines gender, place across 200 years of British Lit
A new book co-authored by a pair of digital humanities scholars, Matthew Wilkens, associate professor of information science and Elizabeth Evans, associate professor of English at Wayne State University, explores the relationship between gender and geography in British literature and offers an example of how computational analysis can be used to extract discoveries from entire digital libraries.
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Bold, bright, and unmistakably Bowers 🎉
Gates Hall’s latest window graphic brings the college’s new branding front and center. A perfect blend of tradition and transformation.
Follow us on Instagram @Cornell.Bowers
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