Two Cornell PhD students have been named 2020 Microsoft Research Ada Lovelace Fellows. The fellowships are awarded to underrepresented students in the field of computing and who are pursuing research aligned to the research areas carried out by Microsoft Research.
Sarah Riley is a PhD student in information science. She studies municipal algorithmic systems and social inequity and is interested in novel methods for detecting, measuring and correcting bias. Her current project explores these issues in the context of data set shift and pretrial risk assessment systems.
Wenqi Xian is a PhD student in computer science. Her research interests lie at the intersection of computer vision and graphics. She is particularly interested in applying computer vision to enable creativity and augment human perception of reality. Her current research focuses on simplifying image and video editing by leveraging 3D geometric reasoning. In the future she hopes to continue exploring new machine learning models to improve scene understanding and enable smarter image synthesis and manipulation.