By Tom Fleischman for the Cornell Chronicle
Researchers studying verification of randomized algorithms, police violence worldwide, polymer nanoparticle synthesis and robotics are among the 10 Cornell assistant professors who have recently received National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Awards.
Over the next five years, each will receive approximately $400,000 to $600,000 from the program, which supports early-career faculty “who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization,” according to the NSF. Each funded project must include an educational component.
Bharath Hariharan, assistant professor of computer science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, will use his award to develop technologies for computer-vision recognition systems that can identify difficult visual concepts without large datasets. Current systems must be trained on datasets of millions of images which have been painstakingly labeled by human annotators. Such datasets are difficult to create for many application domains, such as microscopy; they may also run afoul of privacy concerns. Recognition systems that can work with limited training data will unlock many downstream applications and increase accessibility. The educational component will include a workshop for high school students from underrepresented communities.
Hariharan joins fellow assistant professor of computer science, Justin Hsu, in winning the award this year.
This story originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle