Andrew Owens wants computers to learn like humans do — by watching, listening, and feeling the world around them.

As an associate professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Owens is building systems that can perceive the world through sight, sound, and touch, without needing human-labeled training data. His research has led to surprising and playful creations, from AI that generates soundtracks for silent videos to models that create visual illusions, like images that flip between a penguin and a giraffe depending on your perspective.

But beneath the whimsy is a serious goal: to make AI systems more intuitive, more autonomous, and more aligned with how humans experience reality. Owens’ work has implications for everything from robotics to misinformation detection — including recent efforts to identify AI-generated images.

Read more on the Cornell Tech website.