VASC Seminar - Abe Davis
October 19, 2026 3:30PM—4:30PM
Location:
In Person
-
Newell-Simon 3305
Speaker:
ABE DAVIS,
Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, Cornell University
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/abe/group/
AI is rapidly changing the roles that humans play as developers and users of new technology. In this talk, I will discuss three of those shifting roles and how my group addresses them through technical innovation and interdisciplinary design. Across these projects, understanding human roles is central to determining what systems should optimize, what data they need, and how they can be trusted.
Humans as objective functions: Many real-world applications involve optimizing user-specific objectives, but users’ descriptions of those objectives can be vague, inconsistent, or even self-contradictory. I will discuss our work on Interactive Explainable Ranking (Best Paper, CHI 2026), which combines optimization, AI, and interaction design to help users identify and resolve contradictions in how they evaluate different items—from open-ended course projects to purchasing options or contestants in a competition to find the best cat.
Humans as a source of data: AI is only effective if we have the right data, and many important applications depend on specific or individualized data that needs to be captured in uncontrolled settings. Multiple projects in my group focus on designing systems that help humans capture such data using mobile devices. This work connects capture guidance, sampling theory, computational imaging, and interaction design to support downstream learning, with applications spanning remote healthcare, infrastructure, and agriculture.
Humans as adversaries: Some advances in AI also carry significant potential for harm, which calls for designing new approaches to protect against adversarial use. One problem that AI has made particularly challenging is video forensics. I will discuss my group’s work on designing coded illumination systems to add near-imperceptible watermarks to lighting in high-stakes environments. These watermarks make it easier to detect manipulation in recorded videos without requiring access to or control over recording cameras.
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Abe Davis is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where his group works at the intersection of human-AI systems and visual computing. He earned his Ph.D. in EECS at MIT. His dissertation received the Sprowls Award for Best PhD Thesis in Computer Science at MIT, as well as the ACM
SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention Award. He has received the NSF CAREER Award and a Sloan Research Fellowship, and has published award-winning papers in venues across visual computing
and HCI. He has also been recognized in Forbes’ “30 Under 30” and Business Insider’s “50 Scientists Who Are Changing the World.”
The VASC seminar is generously sponsored by HeyGen