Jason Koski/Cornell University
Interim President Michael I. Kotlikoff addressed the 500 graduates and nearly 2,000 guests in the Dec. 22 ceremony, held in Barton Hall.
Partnerships aiming to minimize construction waste in Central New York, address isolation and cognitive loss through performance, and promote and nurture local startups received the annual Cornell Town-Gown Awards, announced Nov. 16 at Cinemapolis.
For six generations, Mohawk ironworkers have “walked the steel.” Indigenous people began ironworking in the 19th century, when they were hired to build railroad bridges in Canada. They helped craft the New York City skyline, working on projects including the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the World Trade Center.
Craig Wiggers grew up in Alabama. During his 25-year career in the U.S. Marines he served in Iraq and Afghanistan. So when he moved to Ithaca as a Cornell ROTC instructor in 2012, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with snow. “At first my wife and I spent our winters staring at the walls and waiting for spring,” said Wiggers, now director of administration at the Department of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).
Elora Robeck ’24 couldn’t find rubbing alcohol. She needed alcohol to preserve the soft-bodied insects she’d collected near her home in Missouri, for her entomology class at Cornell. But it wasn’t included in her box of supplies, because alcohol is too flammable to ship. Her local drug store was all sold out. So at her professor’s suggestion, she asked her father to buy a bottle of 190-proof Everclear instead.
Four Cornell undergraduates spent the summer learning about the latest cloud computing technologies and making contributions to the Aristotle Cloud Federation as well as the computational tools researchers use to make scientific breakthroughs. Their work and learning experiences were funded by the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, which supports research activities by undergraduates in NSF-funded areas.
The National Science Foundation has renewed its funding for the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility (CNF), with a five-year, $7.5 million grant to continue supporting academic and commercial research in nanofabrication – the design and manufacture of devices measured in nanometers.
Machine learning can assess the effectiveness of mathematical tools used to predict the movements of financial markets, according to new Cornell research based on the largest dataset ever used in this area.
As technology begins to transform farming, a team of Cornell researchers is exploring how digital agriculture could affect small and midsized farms, as well as its likely effect on the environment, to inform the design of these developing technologies.
Spring 2020 was a semester like no other. Over the course of a few weeks, thousands of classes – lectures and seminars, laboratory and performance courses, capstone projects and veterinary clinics – transitioned entirely online. Instructors navigated technical and logistical difficulties, as well as the shifting realities of a global pandemic. But amid the challenges, students and faculty found opportunities for innovation, connection and intellectual growth.
Most experts agree that state-sponsored hackers in Russia are trying to use the internet to infiltrate the U.S. electrical grid and sabotage elections.And yet internet security teams in the U.S. and Europe actively seek to cooperate with their Russian counterparts, setting aside some of their differences and focusing on the issues where they can establish mutual trust.
"“When you start studying a biological process that becomes more intricate and complex than you can just simply intuit, you have to discipline your mind with a computer model."
The four faculty teams that received funding support through the President’s Visioning Committee on Cornell in New York City have conducted cross-campus workshops, hosted interdisciplinary talks and expanded their outreach as they move towards presenting final results in the fall.
Assistant professors Damek Davis, Christina Delimitrou and Robert A. DiStasio Jr. have won 2020 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The fellowships support early-career faculty members’ original research and education related to science, technology, mathematics and economics.
The Cornell Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) is among 10 collaborators awarded a $2.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop the concept for a Scalable Cyberinfrastructure Institute for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics.Adam Brazier, a computational scientist with CAC, is the technical lead on the project, which is being led by the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
The Nairobi Play Project, funded by the United Nations Children’s Fund Kenya Country Program, seeks to foster intercultural learning between groups in or at risk of conflict. In 30 after-school sessions led by teachers who are themselves refugees, students learn basic computing concepts and develop video games with community-based themes.
Anil Nerode spent his childhood on the move.As the son of an itinerant yogi living in the United States, “I went to around 50 grammar schools in 50 places,” said Nerode, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences. “I was never anywhere more than a few weeks.”So in 1959, when he found a place he liked – Cornell – he settled down and stayed put.
At the intersection of psychology, artificial intelligence and robotics, researchers seek to understand how people understand others, whether human or robot.
Two College of Arts & Sciences faculty members were awarded grants by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of its Office of Science Early Career Research Program. Jared Maxson, Ph.D. ’15 and Brad Ramshaw, both assistant professors of physics, will receive at least $750,000 over five years to support their scientific endeavors.
Former national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley ’69, right, in conversation with former Rep. Steve Israel, left, director of Cornell’s Institute of Politics and Global Affairs, at the Olin Lecture June 7 in Bailey Hall.
Before Clinton Ikioda ’19 came to Cornell, students and staff at his high school said he’d been admitted only to fill a diversity quota. Once he arrived, he felt constant pressure to prove he belonged – as well as a persistent worry that he didn’t.
The Milstein program "prepares students to understand both the technical and the human aspects of new technologies," said Cornell President Martha Pollack.
Samuel Barnett ’19 has been named one of 11 junior fellows by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.Barnett, a College Scholar whose studies focus on national security and geopolitics, will spend his fellowship year working with Carnegie’s executive office on issues of U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy.
To make a Dadaist poem, artist Tristan Tzara once said, cut out each word of a newspaper article. Put the words into a bag and shake. Remove the words from the bag one at a time, and write them down in that order.
An avalanche of digital data, combined with sophisticated algorithms to analyze it, heralds a technological transformation as important as the emergence of the internet, said panelists at the launch of the Cornell-r4 Applied AI Initiative, held Dec. 6 at Cornell Tech.
The university is launching two new multicollege departments – one in statistics and data science, and one in computational biology – to meet evolving research needs, encourage collaboration, and improve the quality of teaching and learning in these increasingly essential fields.
Artificial intelligence is guiding a growing number of decisions in criminal justice, education, health care and other areas, with the potential to significantly alter people’s lives.
A pioneering network-science scholar whose work reshaped the scientific understanding of the dynamics of social influence will give a talk Sept. 13, sharing insights gained over 20 years of research into the field he helped create.
Newly digitized documents from the archives of the International Workers’ Order (IWO) and the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order – including three letters from artist Marc Chagall – cast light on the lives of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants in the United States during World War II and the Cold War.
Starting Jan. 1, 2018, Cornell University Press will report to Cornell University Library.“We look forward to working closely with the first university press in the nation,” said Gerald Beasley, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. “Both the library and the press share a similar vision to promote a culture of broad inquiry and support the university’s mission to discover, preserve, and disseminate knowledge and creative expression.”
Since its inception in 2010, the Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences has helped to digitize items in Cornell’s collections, from punk music flyers to historic glacial images of Alaska and Greenland to
Hundreds of seldom-seen photographs documenting the journey of African-Americans from the slavery era to the 20th century are now digitized and freely accessible to students and scholars around the world.
At the Central New York THAT (The Humanities and Technology) Camp held in Olin Library, there were no official presenters, while participants voted on workshop topics and met in collaborative sessions.The informal structure suited the subject matter, since digital humanities is a relatively new and rapidly evolving field.
When Douglas Greenberg, M.A. '71, Ph.D. '74, was analyzing 6,000 court cases for his dissertation on crime and law enforcement in 18th-century New York City, computers were not in widespread use. But he realized technology could make his research more efficient.
Runaway slave advertisements – a common sight in North American newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries – are frankly disturbing. They describe people as property, listing their physical attributes and family connections in chilling terms.
Students and scholars can now freely search a new database of Latin and Greek authors that provides links to online versions of their works.The database, the Classical Works Knowledge Base (CWKB), contains metadata about 5,200 works by 1,500 ancient authors, allowing users with a limited knowledge of the classics’ canonical citation system to simply link to passages of digital texts.
College of Arts and Sciences faculty and graduate students have until Jan. 31 to apply for grants to digitize their hidden treasures and make them freely available around the world.
Aby Warburg – whose early 20th-century emphasis on the power of recurrent images was eerily prescient of contemporary thought – died before he could finish his “Mnemosyne Atlas,” consisting of large panels of collages tracing the history of art.
