Welcome to the Inaugural LinkedIn-Cornell grant recipients

At LinkedIn, we're always looking for ways to improve our platform for members and customers and believe collaborating with academia can advance these efforts. That is why we are excited to announce the first group of grant recipients from our partnership with the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Cornell Bowers CIS). These grants provide financial resources to Ph.D. students and faculty for research and amplify efforts in diversity, equity, and inclusion within Cornell Bowers CIS.

The inaugural eight research grants cover areas from training the engineering workforce in the development of fair algorithms to designing optimal interventions for equitable capital allocation, all with the potential to have a positive impact on how we can approach the new world of work. Our eight recipients are:

Anthonia Carter | Information Science: Anthonia, whose faculty advisor is Christobal Cheyre, is a third-year PhD student whose research focuses on designing optimal interventions for equitable capital allocation that drive funding to historically resource-constrained parties.

Karthik Sridharan | Computer Science: Karthik is an associate professor at Cornell, whose research will be centered around reinforcement learning for optimizing long term and short term costs.

Emma Pierson | Computer Science: Emma is an assistant professor of computer science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech who develops data science and machine learning methods to study two broad areas: inequality and healthcare. Her research will focus on training the engineering workforce to develop fair algorithms. 

Allison Koenecke | Information Science: Allison is a visiting assistant professor at Cornell Information Science. Her research will focus on the early stoppage of randomized controlled trials on heterogeneous populations.

Dave S. Matteson | Statistics and Data Science: David is an Associate Department Chair and Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science and Social Statistics at Cornell University. He will focus his research on deep generative models for large-scale ranking and temporal datasets. 

Ruihan Wu | Computer Science: Ruihan, whose faculty advisor is Kilian Weinberger, is a second-year PhD student who will focus her efforts to find, understand, and solve security and privacy problems in machine learning.

Marios Papachristou | Computer Science: Marios, whose faculty advisor is Jon Kleinberg, is a first-year PhD student who will be researching contagion problems, with an emphasis on its impacts on financial networks.

Kimberly Hochstedler | Statistics and Data Science: Kimberly, whose faculty advisor is Martin Wells, is a second-year PhD student whose research will focus on new strategies for handling outcome misclassification in association studies where the outcome is a category with at least three mutually exclusive options and no “gold standard” classification mechanism is available. 

Our research partnership with Cornell Bowers CIS is just one of the ways we’re working to build powerful and purposeful relationships with academia, which also includes our LinkedIn Scholars program. We are excited to see the unique insights and knowledge these collaborations will yield and how this will translate into creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.