Inside the career of longtime engineering professor James West
West, who celebrates his 90th birthday today, remains as passionate about his work as he was when his career began nearly 70 years ago
Image caption: James West By Wick Eisenberg / Published Feb 10, 2021
James West has always viewed age as just a number that does not have a correlation to his ability to work. At 90, he not only oversees a lab of students conducting research, but is just as excited about conducting research as he was at the outset of his career almost 70 years ago. And not even a global pandemic can deter his passion for his work.
December 21, 2020
What makes people good at having conversations? In a recent paper, Cornell researchers explored conversations on a crisis text service in order to figure out how to answer that question.
“The problem we always came up with was that we never knew if the things we observed were correlations, or if they could actually provide useful information to inform how the platform assigns counselors,” said Justine Zhang, doctoral student in information science and first author of “Quantifying the Causal Effects of Conversational Tendencies.”
The paper was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, held virtually Oct. 17-21.