Kavita Bala will offer the morning keynote address for the first Emerging Tech Dialogues event, scheduled for Wednesday, May 29, 2024.

Bala is the Dean of Cornell’s Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and Professor of Computer Science. Her research interests span computer vision, computer graphics, and human perception and she also co-founded GrokStyle --an AI visual search tool -- in 2016. Two years later, the startup was acquired by Facebook.

She co-chaired Cornell’s 2023 generative AI committee for education and pedagogy and said in a CU News story, “We know that our students are going to work and live in an AI-enabled world. If we do not integrate generative AI into our teaching, and continue with business as usual, we will not be setting up our students for success in the future. Like calculators, generative AI requires major curricular change.”

In January 2024, Bala was invited to present the opening keynote address for a Harvard/MIT symposium exploring the excitement surrounding --and potential challenges to-- STEM education and research. That event that convened faculty, researchers, instructors, and students to share new approaches to leveraging AI technologies in the lab, the classroom, and the marketplace of ideas.

At Cornell, "Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education" is also the May 29 theme for an event that is the first in a series of Emerging Tech Dialogues. Read more details about the event and suggest topics of interest for small group discussions when you register for the hybrid activities.