Abe Davis

Assistant Professor at Cornell University, computer scientist, academic, graphics/vision/HCI, tweets are my own

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

@jon_barron Don’t worry, next week when I finish my 101st hour of coding with a modern agentic IDE, this advice will become acceptable 👍

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

@jon_barron Ah, but one must listen to know if they disagree 😉

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

@jon_barron This feels like very specific advice for people writing a very specific type of paper… I also don’t think “stop listening to your advisor” is ever really a good strategy. You don’t always need to do what your adviser says, but it’s generally a good idea to listen.

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

Feature in the Chronicle about our work on Interactive Explainable Ranking, which won a Best Paper Award at #CHI2026! We use optimization, AI, and interaction design to help people make more explainable and consistent decisions. Huge congrats to first author @zhangchaodesign!

[Cornell Chronicle @CornellNews]

A new AI tool, Interactive Explainable Ranking, developed at @Cornell_Bowers, is designed to help users rank a set of choices – job applicants, graduate schools, even Oscar candidates. VIDEO @acm_chi @AbeDavis @CornellGrad https://t.co/ZJlCv6lESS

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

Come check out our papers at #CHI2026 this year!

- "Narrix" | Thu, 16 Apr | 9:00 AM | P1 R127
- "Interactive Explainable Ranking" *Best Paper Award!* | Thu, 16 Apr | 11:15 AM | Area 1+2+3 Theatre
- "CineCraft" | Fri, 17 Apr | 9:48 AM | P1 R128

More on each project to follow!

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

Honored to be named a Sloan Fellow! So much gratitude for all of my collaborators and others who have supported me! And, of course, a very special thanks to my amazing research group! I am so fortunate to work with such awesome students! #SloanFellow

[Sloan Foundation @SloanFoundation]

Congrats to the 126 early-career scholars awarded a 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship, whose creativity and innovation set them apart as the next generation of scientific leaders! Our Fellows represent 7 fields and 44 institutions across the US and Canada.

https://t.co/8ENNQ2s6Ov

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

@MattNiessner Clear dissemination is part of scientific merit, and what is a paper if not text and visuals?

LLMs tend to polish by misrepresenting, which should not be confused with good presentation. Academic slop has mostly just raised the noise floor and made good science harder to do.

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

@jon_barron Ok, but does this factor in the cost of all those unplayed games sitting in people’s Steam library that were purchased on sale because “surely I’ll have time to play that, someday…”?

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

AI is powerful, but its biggest impact so far has been to erase *useful* friction: proof-of-work we used to assess candidates, curate content, confirm (human) learning, and make fraud harder to scale. "AI slop" is a cute term for something with potentially terrifying consequences

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

@IanArawjo It's very hard to raise the bar of a publication, so when new tools makes it easy to meet old standards, you get a lot of obvious, opportunistic papers. Criteria like "was this interesting?" or "did I learn something?" are often tragically under-valued in reviews...

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

Come see @megatran23 present our work on MeCapture at #SIGGRAPH2025 appy hour! Based on our UIST2024 paper with @ethane_yang and @lique_taylor.

[Eric Ming Chen @ericmchen1]

Come see our talk on "Pocket Time-Lapse" at SIGGRAPH today at 4pm in the Image Representation, Editing, & Generation session!
West Building, Rooms 118-120.

With @zzigakovacic , @madhavaggar and @AbeDavis

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

Come check out our 3 papers @ #SIGGRAPH2025! @liuxr0831 will talk today in the design session at 9:45, @gfxptr today at the Comp Imaging at session 2:15pm, and @ericmchen1 on Wed at 4pm in the imaging session!

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

Excited to share our ACM TOG/ SIGGRAPH '25 work on Noise-Coded Illumination (NCI)! We use coded noise to add an invisible watermark to lighting that helps detect fake or manipulated video. With @gfxptr and collaborators @zekun_hao and @SergeBelongie. url: https://t.co/7v8Ilvl4c6

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

A long a depressing thread

[Lior Pachter @lpachter]

This week in academia, a not so short🧵...

1. Staff reductions and other cost cutting measures coming to Brown University https://t.co/N3Py1ycIHF

[Lior Pachter @lpachter]

This week in academia, a not so short🧵...

1. Staff reductions and other cost cutting measures coming to Brown University https://t.co/N3Py1ycIHF

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

@getjonwithit @honest_math I think it’s very different. It matters what we automate. People too often try to use AI to automate actual reasoning, where there are opportunities to make new observations and innovate. Foregoing that process has a much greater cost than using a calculator.

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

@exJumon @jxmnop Haven't read the paper (yet), but there is value in publishing an explanation of how something works, even if commercial software has a closed-source implementation. The purpose of publication is to share knowledge, not just claim credit for doing something first.

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

@jon_barron Amazing movie. I dressed as Arthur Frayn’s floating head for Halloween one year in grad school… 😐

[Abe Davis @AbeDavis]

@jon_barron @jbhuang0604 I don’t think this means that text is necessarily “more informative than images”. We shouldn’t be surprised that we can learn more from two modalities than one. Text captures different information, and that information is useful, so including it helps.