On the heels of a multimillion-dollar partnership launched last spring, stakeholders from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and LinkedIn convened for three days of research sharing and events to kickoff this first-of-its-kind partnership.

The series of events, which took place September 7 through 9 on Cornell University’s Ithaca, NY, campus, brought together researchers from across Cornell Bowers CIS’s three departments and included several presentations from faculty and student researchers, including recipients of the inaugural research grants announced in June

Souvik Ghosh, a director of engineering at LinkedIn, also ushered in the Department of Computer Science’s Artificial Intelligence Seminar with his talk “Some Challenges with Recommender Systems at LinkedIn.”

The kickoff wasn’t only about research. Around 75 students, representing a variety of majors and graduate and undergrad students across Cornell, attended two events sponsored by the Underrepresented Minorities in Computing and Women in Computing at Cornell student groups: a Rock Your LinkedIn Profile workshop, and bowling night. 

At the workshop, students learned tips and tricks to help make their profiles stand out and best practices for networking. They also had the opportunity to hear from Cornell alumni who discussed their career paths, what it’s like working at LinkedIn, and how to land a job post-graduation. 

LinkedIn also connected with more than 40 masters and Ph.D. students at a separate evening networking event.

The five-year strategic partnership supports innovative research ranging from advances in machine learning to improving equity, fairness, and privacy in computing methodology and practice. Through these grants, the partnership opens new channels for communication and cooperation between scientists at Cornell Bowers CIS and LinkedIn that will yield high-impact research in these areas.

Louis DiPietro is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.