AI for Teams

Lutz Finger is an esteemed technologist with a diverse background in building innovative technology platforms for companies including Google, LinkedIn, and Snap Inc.. He is the founder of R2Decide, a platform for generative AI tools.

Finger is a regular contributor to Forbes, where he writes about AI and deep learning. His book Ask, Measure, Learn was published in 2014 and serves as a non-technical guide on how to extract significant business value from big data. Finger serves as an advisor, venture partner, and angel investor at several data-centric corporations in Europe and the United States. He has an MBA from INSEAD and an M.S. in quantum physics from TU Berlin.

Finger, who resides in the San Francisco Bay area, aims to bring over 20 years of diversified experience in data science and product management to his students at Cornell.

Linda Nozick is Professor and Director of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. She is co-founder and a past director of the College Program in Systems Engineering and has been the recipient of several awards, including a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Clinton for “the development of innovative solutions to problems associated with the transportation of hazardous waste.” Dr. Nozick has authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications, many focused on transportation, the movement of hazardous materials, and the modeling of critical infrastructure systems. She has been an associate editor for Naval Research Logistics and a member of the editorial board of Transportation Research Part A. Dr. Nozick has served on two National Academy Committees to advise the U.S. Department of Energy on renewal of their infrastructure. 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. Dr. Nozick holds a B.S. in Systems Analysis and Engineering from the George Washington University and an MSE 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.

Chris Meredith is a senior portfolio manager and the Director of Research and Portfolio Management at O’Shaughnessy Asset Management (OSAM). He reports to the CEO/CIO and is responsible for managing the investment activities of the firm, which includes supervising the portfolio management team, investment strategy research, and overseeing the firm’s trading efforts. Mr. Meredith’s portfolio management responsibilities include daily model generation, strategy optimization, reviewing account rebalances, and trade analysis. On the research side, he leads a team of analysts that conducts research on new and existing strategies and evaluates the efficacy of new factors. Prior to joining OSAM, Mr. Meredith was a senior research analyst on the Systematic Equity Team at BSAM. He was a director at Oracle Corporation and spent eight years as a technology professional before attending the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.

Mr. Meredith holds a B.A. in English 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.