The Academic Minute from 8.21 – 8.25
Monday
Farzin Lotfi-Jam – Cornell University
A Recursive History of Urban Simulation
Farzin Lotfi-Jam is Assistant Professor in the department of Architecture at Cornell AAP where he leads the Realtime Urbanism Lab housed within the Center for Cities. His lab connects advances in computation, communication, and immersive media to understand the social effects of new urban technologies. Engaging critical and computational approaches, the lab creates bridges between architecture, urbanism, gaming studies, and virtual world making practices. The lab produces research, public projects, and curricular activities using extended reality technologies, urban simulators, gaming engines, spatial data, agent-based modeling, digital twins, and smart and responsive urban systems.
Tuesday
Malte Jung – Cornell University
Social Cost of A.I. in Social Interactions
Malte Jung is an Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University and the Nancy H. ’62 and Philip M. ’62 Young Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow. He holds field appointments in Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, and Communication. His research explores the design of autonomous systems and how they impact people and their interactions with each other. Malte’s work has received several awards including an NSF CAREER award. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, and a PhD Minor in Psychology from Stanford University and a Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich. Prior to joining Cornell, Malte Jung completed a postdoc at the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization at Stanford University.
Wednesday
Jonathan P. Chang – Cornell University
How A.I. Tools Could Help Make Online Discussions Healthier
Jonathan P. Chang is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Cornell, advised by Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. He earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College. Jonathan’s current focus is on studying the problem of content moderation on online platforms and social media. He applies NLP and computational social science techniques both to characterize and model the patterns of misbehavior online and to develop computational tools that can help improve the effectiveness of content moderation.
Thursday
Qian Yang – Cornell University
A.I. Tool Gains Doctors’ Trust by Giving Advice Like a Colleague
Qian Yang is an assistant professor in Information Science at Cornell University and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher. Her research expertise is in designing AI systems that effectively collaborate with human experts. She has created systems across many critical human-AI collaboration domains, including clinical decision-making, medical imaging, writing, autonomous driving, and accessibility. Reflecting on this related vein of research, she developed practical methods and tools for AI application designers and innovators. Yang is an AI2050 fellow and her lab’s work has been generously supported by the NSF, the NIH, among others.
Friday
Jenny Sabin – Cornell University
A.I. Architecture Driven by Humans, Powered by A.I.
Jenny E. Sabin is an architectural designer whose work is at the forefront of a new direction for 21st century architectural practice — one that investigates the intersections of architecture and science and applies insights and theories from biology and mathematics to the design of responsive material structures and ecological spatial interventions for diverse audiences. Sabin is the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture and the inaugural Chair for the new multi-college Department of Design Tech at the Cornell College of Architecture, Art, and Planning where she established a new advanced research degree in Matter Design Computation. She is principal of Jenny Sabin Studio, an experimental architectural design studio based in Ithaca and Director of the Sabin Design Lab at Cornell AAP. Her book, LabStudio: Design Research Between Architecture and Biology, co-authored with Peter Lloyd Jones was published in July 2017. In that same year, Sabin won MoMA & MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program with her submission, Lumen.
