Deborah Estrin
Cornell University · Computer Science
Active 1985–2025
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About
Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech in New York City, where she holds The Robert V. Tishman Founder's Chair and serves as the Associate Dean for Impact. She is also an Affiliate Faculty member at Weill Cornell Medicine. Estrin founded the Public Interest Technology Initiative (PiTech) at Cornell Tech, which integrates meaningful public impact into students' training and future careers. Her current research focuses on digitally-enabled innovations that support patients and healthcare providers in optimizing clinical outcomes and quality of life. She leads strategic initiatives to enhance external engagement and public interest impact across the Cornell Tech faculty and student body, spanning areas such as digital health, extended reality (XR), and artificial intelligence (AI). Prior to joining Cornell University, Estrin was the Founding Director of the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA, where she pioneered the development of mobile and wireless systems for real-time data collection and analysis about the physical world. She co-founded the non-profit startup Open mHealth and has served on scientific advisory boards for early-stage mobile health startups, as well as an Amazon Scholar. Estrin's distinguished honors include the ACM Athena Lecture (2006), Anita Borg Institute's Women of Vision Award for Innovation (2007), the IEEE Internet Award (2017), the MacArthur Fellowship (2018), and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2022).…
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Computer Security
- Medicine
- Political Science
- World Wide Web
- Business
- Medical education
- Multimedia
- Nursing
- Human–computer interaction
Selected publications
Augmented Reality in Real-time Telemedicine and Telementoring: Scoping Review
JMIR mhealth and uhealth · 2023 · 87 citations
BACKGROUND: Over the last decade, augmented reality (AR) has emerged in health care as a tool for visualizing data and enhancing simulation learning. AR, which has largely been explored for communication and collaboration in nonhealth contexts, could play a role in shaping future remote medical services and training. This review summarized existing studies implementing AR in real-time telemedicine and telementoring to create a foundation for health care providers and technology developers to und…
Digital Health Applications in Oncology: An Opportunity to Seize
JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute · 2022 · 78 citations
Digital health advances have transformed many clinical areas including psychiatric and cardiovascular care. However, digital health innovation is relatively nascent in cancer care, which represents the fastest growing area of health-care spending. Opportunities for digital health innovation in oncology include patient-facing technologies that improve patient experience, safety, and patient-clinician interactions; clinician-facing technologies that improve their ability to diagnose pathology and…
The Illusion of Empathy? Notes on Displays of Emotion in Human-Computer Interaction
2024-05-11 · 60 citations
articleOpen accessFrom ELIZA to Alexa, Conversational Agents (CAs) have been deliberately designed to elicit or project empathy. Although empathy can help technology better serve human needs, it can also be deceptive and potentially exploitative. In this work, we characterize empathy in interactions with CAs, highlighting the importance of distinguishing evocations of empathy between two humans from ones between a human and a CA. To this end, we systematically prompt CAs backed by large language models (LLMs) to…
Revitalizing the public internet by making it extensible
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review · 2021 · 36 citations
There is now a significant and growing functional gap between the public Internet, whose basic architecture has remained unchanged for several decades, and a new generation of more sophisticated private networks. To address this increasing divergence of functionality and overcome the Internet's architectural stagnation, we argue for the creation of an Extensible Internet (EI) that supports in-network services that go beyond best-effort packet delivery. To gain experience with this approach, we h…
JMIR Formative Research · 2023-02-16 · 29 citations
articleOpen accessBackground Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have increasingly appeared in the medical literature in the past decade, with AR recently being studied for its potential role in remote health care delivery and communication. Recent literature describes AR’s implementation in real-time telemedicine contexts across multiple specialties and settings, with remote emergency services in particular using AR to enhance disaster support and simulation education. Despite the introduction of AR…
Recent grants
Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS)
NSF · $39.4M · 2002–2013
NSF · $2.0M · 2013–2018
Ethics Education for Participatory Urban Sensing
NSF · $298k · 2008–2012
Frequent coauthors
- 101 shared
Kristofer S. J. Pister
University of California, Berkeley
- 100 shared
Phil Gibbons
University of California, Berkeley
- 100 shared
Viktor K. Prasanna
- 100 shared
Sajal K. Das
- 100 shared
Christos H. Papadimitriou
Columbia University
- 100 shared
Josep Dı́az
- 100 shared
Habib M. Ammari
Texas A&M University – Kingsville
- 100 shared
Sotiris Nikoletseas
Labs
Research activities focus on digitally-enabled innovations that support patients and providers in optimizing clinical outcomes and quality of life.
Education
- 1985
PhD, EECS
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Awards & honors
- IEEE Internet Award
- MacArthur Fellowship
- IEEE John von Neumann Medal
- Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering
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