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Cornell systems engineering doctoral student Akshay Ajagekar assesses the growth of lettuce plants in a Guterman Lab greenhouse. Ajagekar has prototyped an AI-based controller to reduce energy use in lettuce greenhouses in the state by 30%. New York has approved more than $400 million in public and private funding to create Empire AI, a consortium of seven of New York’s leading universities and research institutions. Jason Koski/Cornell University
Nutrition in the West is a young discipline – only 100 years old. Artificial intelligence is even newer. Combining the two could create a powerful tool to customize health advice, instead of the current one-size-fits-all approach.
“We can harness the power of AI to now personalize nutrition recommendations efficiently to a single person or group of people accounting for their biology, and importantly, we can also contextualize the advice for the food environment they live in,” said Dr. Saurabh Mehta, the Janet and Gordon Lankton Professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences in the College of Human Ecology.
Mehta’s team is using generative AI to help power health dashboards and chatbots that use clinical information and data only from high-quality, evidence-based sources. It’s among dozens of ambitious, cross-disciplinary projects at Cornell that will be advanced by Empire AI, a $400 million effort to create a shared academic research computing facility. The users of that facility – including Cornell faculty and students – will aim to promote responsible research and AI opportunities focused on public good.
Announced April 22 by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the consortium comprises seven of New York’s leading universities and research institutions, including Cornell.
“Research that creates and uses AI is already changing the world, and researchers at Cornell are leading the way in responsible and trustworthy development of AI tools for the greatest good,” said Krystyn Van Vliet, vice president for research and innovation.
“We are so appreciative of the state and other contributors – Empire AI is a critical investment in a shared academic research computing facility that will impact fields ranging from agriculture to medicine and urban development,” she said. “The consortium of Cornell and other terrific New York State universities and research institutions partnered in a new way to imagine this, and now get to make it a reality.”
“Foundational research on generative AI requires immense computing power currently unavailable to academics,” said Kavita Bala, dean of Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and lead dean of the Cornell AI Initiative. “Empire AI will change that, enabling core research in generative AI models in academia that can be applied for the benefit of society in areas as wide ranging as nutrition, climate change, material discovery, health and medicine, physics and more.”
Cornell researchers have laid the groundwork, already piloting research efforts to employ AI to benefit New Yorkers’ daily lives and health outcomes. Mehta – founding director of the Cornell Center for Precision Nutrition and Health (CPNH) – and Samantha Huey, a research associate in CPNH, are harnessing AI for a number of applications to help people make nutrition and health-related decisions for end users. This means consumers, but also those in governmental and nongovernmental agencies focused on effectively and efficiently establishing and following policy.
Mehta predicts that AI will accelerate the implementation of other nutrition and food-is-medicine programs, including medically tailored meals and grocery prescriptions.
“AI should impact the uptake and reach of Dietary Guidelines for Americans and help in defining policies and quantifying subsidies,” said Mehta, who is partnering with the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety at the World Health Organization (CPNH hosts the WHO collaborating center for nutrition research for health at Cornell) and Fei Wang, professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine, among others, on this work. CPNH also is home to the Artificial Intelligence and Precision Nutrition Training Program, the first National Institutes of Health-supported training grant focused on AI.
The founding Empire AI institutions – also including Columbia University, New York University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the State University of New York, the City University of New York and the Flatiron Institute – will use funds to advance research through computational methods, including data analysis, theory, modeling and simulation.
Funding of this sort, said Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech, enables Cornell and other institutions to work with larger models than any university can afford on its own.
“Right now, the U.S. is the leading supplier of AI models,” he said. “But if we want to keep up with other countries, and with states like California and Massachusetts, these kinds of state-level investments are critical for supporting the research.”
At Cornell, artificial intelligence models are being harnessed in many other medical contexts.
Rachit Saluja, a doctoral student affiliated with the Department of Radiology at Weill Cornell Medical School, is employing this new technology to codify and systematize the language radiologists use to describe the images they read – advancements aimed at reducing workload for doctors and streamlining patient care. Saluja works with Mert Sabuncu, professor at Cornell Tech and in Cornell Engineering and vice chair of AI and engineering research in the Department of Radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine. Right now, Saluja and his team are collecting multi-modality datasets and figuring out how the model will ingest it all, aiming to create a system that suggests text.
There’s a lot of unstructured text data in radiologists’ reports, with little common nomenclature to describe what they see in images, Saluja said. “This text data is really valuable, and no AI could parse it until now. When there is an image present in the system, the model will look at the image and give recommendations to the radiologists.”
In order not to bias radiologists, he said, the AI model can give several recommendations for text.
“In the U.S., radiologists are clogged with workload,” Saluja said. “If we can develop clever workflows, they will be more efficient and make better decisions. The goal is not to replace the radiologists.”
Saluja said the research is about a year and a half from implementation, depending on resourcing, and that these AI models could be developed separately for the different areas of radiology – musculoskeletal, neuroradiology, mammography, etc. – or developed as a generalist model that can be fine-tuned for specific uses.
For patients, greater medical efficiency means shorter wait times and perhaps even keener diagnoses. For shoppers, increased food production efficiencies can mean more money in their pocket. Cornell systems engineering doctoral student Akshay Ajagekar has prototyped an AI-based controller to reduce energy use in lettuce greenhouses in the state by 30%, an innovation with the potential to reduce retail produce prices for New York shoppers.
Akshay Ajagekar and Nicholas Kaczmar, a research support specialist at CALS, scrutinize baby lettuces in a greenhouse at Guterman Lab in Ithaca. Jason Koski/Cornell University
A marked rise in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) and vertical farms in and around cities holds the promise of greater food security and resiliency. Its downside: Food grown indoors, often with robotics, banks of LED lights and computer-monitored watering and nutrient systems, comes with energy costs higher than food grown more traditionally with soil and sun.
“Can we apply AI where controllers can run by themselves in order to improve performance? I got intrigued by this problem and started investigating how to minimize overall energy consumption of greenhouses while maximizing production,” Ajagekar said.
He says they chose lettuce as a crop because it is grown in New York extensively, but tomatoes or other greenhouse crops could have been easily substituted. They conducted their trials in a greenhouse in Ithaca and a five-greenhouse system in New York City, using AI to minimize energy consumption by controlling indoor temperature, relative humidity, supplementary lighting and other variables.
“Both of these projects demonstrate efficiency quite nicely,” Ajagekar said. “This could be scalable in a cost-effective manner.”
At the moment, generative AI is often cast as a shape-shifting villain, sparking fears about loss of control, job displacement, perpetuating biases or disinformation, and chipping away at individual privacy. Public anxiety about this powerful tool has been exacerbated by the secrecy of generative AI companies intent on preserving their intellectual property.
Empire AI as a consortium and research computing facility will bring greater transparency to the promise and scope of this new technology, situating New York state at the epicenter of research aimed at improving lives.
“One of the ways mankind has overcome adversity in history is by embracing advances in technology,” Mehta said. “AI is here to stay and can make a difference in primary health care and for nutrition for people who need it the most.”
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Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.
Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.
On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.
Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”
The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.
Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through the SUNY – The State University of New York system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.
Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.
History
Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.
Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.
Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.
Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.
Research
Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States.
Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.
The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.
Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s JPL-Caltech and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.
Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].
The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.
In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.
In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.
Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.
During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.
Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation.
The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.
As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex (UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.
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