AI for Teams

Lutz Finger is a Silicon Valley technologist and Cornell faculty member with 20+ years of experience building AI-driven products and platforms at Google, LinkedIn, and Snap. He is a serial entrepreneur (R2Decide, acquired in 2025; Fisheye Analytics, acquired in 2013) and currently leads AI strategy at XGEN AI, developing next-generation generative retail solutions.

Finger is also a frequent Forbes contributor on AI and the future of commerce. He is a Venture Partner at Cherry Ventures, serves on multiple advisory boards, and has advised and invested in data-centric companies across the United States and Europe. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and an M.S. in Quantum Physics from TU Berlin.

Linda K Nozick is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. She is a past Director of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a former Director and co-founder of Cornell’s College Program in Systems Engineering.

Professor Nozick has received numerous honors, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), presented by President Clinton for “the development of innovative solutions to problems associated with the transportation of hazardous waste.”

Her national service includes two successive appointments by President Obama to the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB), where she contributed to federal-level policy guidance on the packaging, storage, and transportation of commercial spent nuclear fuel.
Professor Nozick has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications, with research spanning transportation systems, hazardous materials movement, and the modeling of critical infrastructure systems. She has served as an Associate Editor for Naval Research Logistics and as a member of the editorial board of Transportation Research Part A. She has also served on National Academy committees advising the U.S. Department of Energy on infrastructure renewal and resilience.

During the 1998–1999 academic year, she was a Visiting Associate Professor in the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

She earned a B.S. in Systems Analysis and Engineering from The George Washington University and both an M.S.E. and Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kilian Weinberger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Machine Learning under the supervision of Lawrence Saul and his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Oxford. During his career he has won several best paper awards at ICML (2004), CVPR (2004, 2017), AISTATS (2005) and KDD (2014, runner-up award). In 2011 he was awarded the Outstanding AAAI Senior Program Chair Award and in 2012 he received an NSF CAREER award. He was elected co-Program Chair for ICML 2016 and for AAAI 2018. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Daniel M Lazar ’29 Excellence in Teaching Award. Kilian Weinberger’s research focuses on Machine Learning and its applications. In particular, he focuses on learning under resource constraints, metric learning, machine learned web-search ranking, computer vision and deep learning. Before joining Cornell University, he was an Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and before that he worked as a research scientist at Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara.

Oleg Melnikov received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Rice University, advised by Dr. Katherine Ensor on the thesis topic of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) applied to time series. He currently leads a Data Science team at ShareThis Inc. in Palo Alto, CA, and has decades of experience in various fields, including mathematical and statistical research, teaching, databases and software development, finance (portfolio management and security analysis), and adtech.

Dr. Melnikov’s academic path began with a B.S. in Computer Science (and some years in pre-med); now, he holds Master’s degrees in Computer Science (Machine Learning track) from Georgia Institute of Technology, Mathematics from UC Irvine (where he was in the Math Ph.D. program), and Statistics from Rice University, as well as an MBA from UCLA and a certificate in Quantitative Finance (MFE equivalent). Passionate about education and hard sciences, Dr. Melnikov has taught statistics, machine learning, data science, quantitative finance, and programming courses at eCornell, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Rice University, and UC Irvine.

Karan Girotra, Professor of Operations, Technology and Information Management (OTIM), is the recipient of the Charles H. Dyson Family Professor of Management chair, for a 5-year term. This chair was given by Rob Dyson, MBA ’74 to support a founding faculty position for Johnson instruction at Cornell Tech, in honor of his father, the founder of the Dyson-Kissner-Moran Corporation.

Karan Girotra is a Professor at Cornell Tech and in the Johnson School at Cornell University. Karan collaborates with companies building new business models in the areas of urban living, smart transportation and e-commerce, helping them build rigorous research based solutions.

Karan’s research team has been recognized by multiple awards including the prestigious Wickham Skinner Early Career Research Award and multiple best paper awards. He has also won teaching awards for his teaching on entrepreneurship and new business models and was featured in the Poets and Quant’s Best 40 under 40 business professors lists.

In addition to his academic work, Karan was one of the founders of Terrapass Inc., which the New York Times identified as one of the most noteworthy ideas of 2005. Since then, TerraPass has helped businesses and individuals reduce over hundred million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Karan holds PhD and AM degrees from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Mr. Chris Meredith is currently the Chief Investment Officer for Tax-Smart Strategies at JP Morgan Asset Management.  Chris is providing investment leadership in Tax Smart capabilities across active and index SMAs, and ETF model portfolios for JP Morgan Asset Management. He is leading cross-functional groups, partnering with technology and quantitative teams at JP Morgan and 55ip, with the shared goal of expanding the investment offerings available on the tax management platform and driving scale.

Mr. Meredith is also a Senior Visiting Lecturer for the Finance Department at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.  His teaching mandate has at times included Applied Portfolio Management, Equity Investment Research and Analysis, the Investment Immersion, and Natural Language Processing for Business.  

Previously, Mr. Meredith was the Chief Investment Officer at O’Shaughnessy Asset Management (OSAM), a quantitative equity asset manager and Direct Indexing group.  Mr. Meredith was responsible for all investment functions including supervising the portfolio management team, investment strategy research, tax-management capabilities, trading functions and technology development for the firm.  Prior to joining OSAM, Mr. Meredith was a senior research analyst of the Systematic Equity Team at Bear Stearns Asset Managment.  He was a Director of Technology at Oracle and spent eight years as a technology professional before attending the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. 

Mr. Meredith holds a B.A. from Colgate University, an MBA from Cornell University, an M.A. in Financial Mathematics from Columbia University, and is a Chartered Financial Analyst.  He lives in Chappaqua, New York, with his wife and three children.