Cody Dunne ’07

Three years ago Cody Dunne ’07 then a graduate student working on his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, sat in a school lecture hall and watched Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, defeat two Jeopardy champions at their own game. The faceoff captured national attention.

Now Dunne is part of a new IBM Watson Group in Cambridge, Mass., working on computer advancements even more impressive. “Nowadays, Watson can diagnose some cancers better than doctors or even help you create novel recipes from ingredients you like,” he said.

Dunne has been part of this IBM initiative since it was announced last January, coming over from the T.J. Watson Research Center he joined in 2013 after getting his doctorate in computer science. “Watson Group wanted visualization expertise, so they uprooted our team of four from research and transplanted us by surprise,” he said.
Dunne graduated from Cornell magna cum laude with a double major in computer science and mathematics. He credits the hands-on approach of his professors and focus on group projects in a liberal arts setting as a big advantage.

His current work is with epidemiologists on mapping the flow of an infection across regions of the globe. With a political scientist, he looked at voting patterns in the U.S. Senate to see cliques of senators with identical voting patterns.

He’s also looked at different ways to explore medical records, and worked with an urban planner on mapping how relationships between funding agencies, companies, and individuals in the states of Pennsylvania and Maryland affect financial growth.

“The best visualization research comes from working directly with domain experts in other fields so as to understand the research problems they face and how we might be able to create novel, useful solutions,” he said. “The more I know about their fields the easier this process is.”