Bowers student explores privacy, healthcare, satellite imagery

Vipin Gunda ’25 is excited about projects that apply his computer science knowledge to real-world challenges.

The projects in Assistant Professor Cheng Zhang’s group are a perfect example – EchoWrist and ActSonic are both devices that use acoustic sensing for facial, hand gesture and activity recognition, a method that preserves privacy, unlike video recognition. The applications of this research range from improving accessibility for the disabled to tracking daily habits to help diagnose mental illness. 

“I’ve always been interested in interdisciplinary work,” said Gunda, a math and computer science major in the College of Arts & Sciences and a student in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. “That’s why I applied to A&S, so I could explore all kinds of classes.”

When Gunda first joined Zhang’s lab, he was helping with data collection, but he soon moved on to prototyping and is now using machine learning to improve the devices and working to get them deployed on micro-controller units that could be used on eyeglasses or a wrist band.

“If we can fine-tune this, it could be a health monitor or an assistant in people’s day to day lives,” he said.

Gunda’s experiences at Cornell include being part of the Milstein Program in Technology & Humanity; the Rawlings Cornell Presidential Scholars Program; the Laidlaw Scholars Program of the Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Nexus Scholars Program, among others.

Gunda also works on two projects in the computer vision labs of Provost Kavita Bala, professor of computer science and Prof. Bharath Hariharan, associate professor of computer science. One is working to refine and annotate satellite images, allowing users to search for specific types of forests, trees or structures. The other project will help machine learning models cope when a person wants their data to be removed – rather than retraining the whole model, the fix would allow the system to “unlearn” that specific user without having to do a complete retrain.

“These types of experiences have helped me to narrow down what I want to do,” Gunda said, adding that he’ll be attending graduate school at Princeton when he graduates in May.

Gunda said he’s enjoyed the variety of classes he took in A&S – including a class about animals in film, a class about Japanese language and culture and a course focused on music’s impact on society – and he’s thrilled to be a member of Bowers. “You meet people from everywhere there,” he said.