The Research Team

We unite experts in AI, security, and formal methods, collaborating to advance research that ensures safe and trustworthy AI systems.

Leadership

Alexandra Silva

Principal Investigator

Professor of Computer Science, Cornell Bowers

Works in formal methods, programming languages, and automated reasoning with applications in networking and probabilistic reasoning. Her research includes foundational work on NetKAT, a formally verified programming language and algebra for software‑defined networking that enables rigorous reasoning about network behavior.

Vitaly Shmatikov

Principal Investigator

Professor of Computer Science, Cornell Tech

Leads work in privacy, cryptography, and secure systems. His research highlights real‑world vulnerabilities in digital privacy and machine learning, including groundbreaking de‑anonymization attacks and membership inference attacks on machine learning models.

Faculty

Saikat Dutta

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Cornell Bowers

Works in software engineering, testing, runtime verification, and debugging for machine learning systems. His research develops techniques for automated testing, debugging, and reliability analysis of machine learning‑based software, bridging program analysis with modern machine learning workflows.

Greg Morrisett

Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost, Cornell Tech

Contributes to formal methods and secure systems, including hardware–software co-design and compilers. He also develops programming language technologies for building secure, reliable, and high‑performance software systems, with major contributions such as typed assembly language and software fault isolation.

Andrew Myers

Professor of Computer Science, Cornell Bowers

Develops expressive programming abstractions that simplify building secure, trustworthy, and scalable software systems. His research bridges programming languages, computer security, and distributed systems, emphasizing language-based methods to ensure strong security across local and distributed computation.

Kevin Ellis

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Cornell Bowers

Leads research in artificial intelligence (AI), program synthesis, and neurosymbolic AI. His work explores how AI systems can learn abstract world models, perform program induction, and integrate symbolic reasoning with neural methods, drawing on insights from both machine learning and cognitive science.

Rachee Singh

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Cornell Bowers

Works in systems and networking, developing algorithms and systems for efficient communication over server‑scale, rack‑scale, and long‑haul photonic interconnects. Her research improves the performance of distributed machine learning and large‑scale cloud workloads.

Fred Schneider

Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science

Works in fault‑tolerant distributed computing and formal system verification, developing methods for building trustworthy systems that operate reliably despite failures and attacks. His research spans distributed systems, security, and formal methods, with foundational contributions to system reliability and correctness.