September 24, 2024
Matthew Eichhorn is a lecturer of computer science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. He recently received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Cornell.
What is your academic focus?
CS theory, algorithms, and causal inference.
Could you describe your research?
My research focuses on designing algorithms for societal decision-making. From determining how to allocate scarce resources such as medical supplies, university seats, and public housing, to understanding how to estimate the effectiveness of public health policies or advertising campaigns in the presence of network spillovers, my work thinks about how we can model phenomena such as welfare, fairness, and social interference and leverage the combinatorial structure in these models to design desirable (both computationally and normatively) policies.
What are you most looking forward to as a Cornell faculty member?
I’m looking forward to meeting and working with many amazing students. Cornell students are very bright and dedicated to their studies. It is rewarding to not only teach them, but also to learn from them and their insightful observations, ideas, and questions.
What do you like to do when you’re not working?
I enjoy doing modular origami, which involves folding many small, relatively simple units and linking them together to build complicated geometric structures. I also love card games, board games, and solving the New York Times crossword every day. Finally, as a native of Buffalo, NY, I am a devoted fan of the Buffalo Bills.
What courses are you most looking forward to teaching?
This fall, I’m teaching CS 2800: Mathematical Foundations of Computing. This course is dear to me, both because many of the tools that it introduces are central to my research and because I played a big role in helping redesign and develop the materials for the course as a graduate student.