The Cornell University Board of Trustees has elected CS professors Carla Gomes and Lillian Lee to endowed professorships effective as noted:
Ronald C. and Antonia V. Nielsen Professor — That Carla Gomes, Professor with indefinite tenure, Computing and Information Science, was elected the inaugural Ronald C. and Antonia V. Nielsen Professor, effective July 1, 2020.
Charles Roy Davis Professor — That Lillian Lee, Professor with indefinite tenure, Computing and Information Science, was elected the inaugural Charles Roy Davis Professor, effective July 1, 2020.
Outgoing Chair of CS and incoming Dean of CIS, Kavita Bala, says "Please join me in congratulating Carla and Lillian on these very well-deserved honors!"
Of her current work, Professor Lee says: "These days, I am most interested in connections between natural language processing and social interaction. More and more of life is now manifested online, and many of the digital traces that are left by human activity are increasingly recorded in natural-language format; there are thus tremendous opportunities for natural-language processing to contribute to the analysis and facilitation of socially embedded processes." Click to read about Lee's leadership as co-editor of Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics.
Meanwhile, Professor Gomes writes: "My research area is Artificial Intelligence with a focus on large-scale constraint-based reasoning, optimization, and machine learning. Recently, I have become deeply immersed in the establishment of new field of Computational Sustainability. Computational Sustainability is a new interdisciplinary research field, with the overarching goal of studying and providing solutions to computational problems for balancing environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future." Click to explore coverage of Gomes' work.