When Jason Yosinski grad “cobbled together” a classroom demonstration of two laptops talking to each other side by side, he never expected it to become the talk of YouTube.

Noah Snavely, an assistant professor in Cornell’s computer science program, was awarded one of eight Microsoft Fellowships in order to continue his research on 3D reconstructions from photos on the Internet.

Prof. Michal Lipson, electrical and computer engineering, is a leading researcher in the field of nanophotonics — the study of understanding and utilizing light on the nanometer scale. 

Like a best friend, movie buff, a website like Netflix can give users recommendations based on their search histories.  According to Thorsten Joachims, computer science, Netflix is one of many “systems that act smart.” Smart systems pick up information from a large amount of people and consolidate that information into regularity. 

Prof. Sheila Hemami, electrical and computer engineering, studies signal processing, working so that the deaf community too may take advantage of the cellular revolution.

Today marks the launch of the Sun's new web design, complete with a tidal wave of new online content in all sections. On this site, you'll find videos in Art and Science, podcasts in opinion, blog posts in all sections, and (throughout the site) a brand new look and feel. To mark the event and draw readers onto our site, we decided to make a statement with out front page:

This Peer Review examines three project teams from the engineering program, each striving to construct an autonomous, independent robot.  By land, by air, and by sea, the robots of this Peer Review display the deligent efforts of dedicated, undergraduate teams.

Cornell researches will have greater access to Internet-scale supercomputers for conducting systems and applications research as a result of Yahoo! granting the University access to its cloud computing cluster, ccording to a Yahoo! Research press release.

In an effort to expand its cooperation with top U.S. universities, Yahoo! Inc. will collaborate with Cornell, U.C. Berkeley and University of Massachusetts at Amherst, along with Carnegie Mellon. Yahoo!’s cloud computing cluster will enable Cornell, along with these other universities, to conduct research of large-scale systems software rand explore new applications.

I’ve been meaning to put these notes up for awhile. About three weeks ago, I wrote the feature story for Eclipse on the culture of stress on Cornell’s campus and some of its root causes. I wrote about some strategies people use to de-stress. What I didn’t get to include in the article was some of the ways stress affects genders.

While everyone is under an immense amount of stress due to the economic crisis, the holidays, being swamped at work, the way it affects the genders has important implications for society at large. One example is women in computer science, which illustrates the ways stress can maintain barriers to entry in certain career fields.

Outsourcing is abuzz and computer science enrollment has dropped, but in Cornell’s world-renowned computer science department, students and professors alike are confident that this outsourcing trend will not impact their futures.

When asked if outsourcing is a concern that comes up among friends, Noah Santorello ’09, president of the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates, said, “Never. Computer science is not like finance where everyone’s concerned about getting a job when the economy gets bad.”