Info Sci's Nicola Dell and Aditya Vashistha are among the six Cornellians who were just announced as recipients of 2019-2020 Google Faculty Research Awards.
The goal of the Google Faculty Research Awards program is to recognize cutting-edge research in mutual areas of interest and to “identify and strengthen long-term collaborative relations with faculty working on problems that will impact how future generations use technology,” according to its website.
Dell, assistant professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, along with fellow Award recipient Thomas Ristenpart, associate professor at Cornell Tech, are studying online communities of intimate-partner abusers to understand the strategies, tools and techniques abusers use to monitor, surveil, harass and stalk their victims, both online and offline. The researchers plan to design a measurement pipeline to collect data from these online communities, conduct qualitative analyses of their content and explore ways to automatically detect threats.
Vashistha, assistant professor of information science, designs and builds computing systems to empower people in low-resource environments. His team will use human-centered AI to combat online harassment of marginalized women, and build gender-equitable social computing platforms. The team will explore ways to make voice forums – phone-based communication platforms commonly used by millions of people around the world who are too poor, remote or low-literate to access the internet – more inclusive and equitable for women.
All told, four faculty members from Computing and Information Science received Google Faculty Research Awards: Dell, Ristenpart, Vashistha, and Nate Foster, associate professor of computer science, who is developing new mechanisms, using next-generation hardware, to help make networks faster and cheaper.
A full version of this story appears at the Cornell Chronicle.