Brendan Hogan Rappazzo

I am a Fifth year PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University advised by professor Carla Gomes in the lab of Computational Sustainability. I completed my undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering, with a minor in Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. 

To me, the most exciting prospect of powerful, scalable AI/ML methods is the ability to address sustainability issues. I believe that by studying real world problems we can discover interesting research questions that advance the state and understanding of AI methods. 

Specifically, I am interested in the sub-fields of computer vision (primarily segmentation), self-supervised learning, understanding neural networks (calibration, compression, and initialization methods), active learning, reinforcement learning, and HCI.

Examples of my experience with AI applications include material discovery, monitoring of African elephants, large-scale tracking of seagrass disease, and generation of 1/f noise.


GitHub | Google Scholar | Email: brendanhogan@cs.cornell.edu

Selected Publications

Eelgrass Wasting Disease Monitoring

Brendan H. Rappazzo, Morgan E. Eisenlord, Olivia J. Graham, Lillian R. Aoki, Phoebe D. Dawkins, Drew Harvell, Carla P. Gomes. EeLISA: Combating Global Warming Through the Rapid Analysis of Eelgrass Wasting Disease. IAAI 2021 [PDF] Won IAAI Innovative Application Award

Remote Sensing of Invasive Species

Johan Bjorck*, Brendan H. Rappazzo*, Qinru Shi, Carrie Brown-Lima, Jennifer Dean, Angela Fuller, Carla P. Gomes. Accelerating Ecological Sciences from Above: Spatial Contrastive Learning for Remote Sensing. AAAI 2021*Equal contribution

Elephant Monitoring

Johan Bjorck, Brendan H. Rappazzo, Di Chen, Richard Bernstein, Peter H. Wrege, Carla P. Gomes. Automatic Detection and Compression for Passive Acoustic Monitoring of the African Forest Elephant. AAAI 2019: 476-484 [PDF

CRYSTAL - Multi-Agent AI System for Materials Phase-Mapping

Carla P. Gomes, Junwen Bai, Yexiang Xue, Johan Björck, Brendan Rappazzo, Sebastian Ament, Richard Bernstein, Shufeng Kong, Santosh K. Suram, R. Bruce van Dover, John M. Gregoire. CRYSTAL: a multi-agent AI system for automated mapping of materials' crystal structures. MRS Communications (2019). [PDF]

1/f Noise (Pink Noise) Generation

Guillaume Perez, Brendan Rappazzo, Carla P. Gomes. Extending the Capacity of 1 / f Noise Generation. CP 2018: 601-610 [PDF]
Image from http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1122a/

Phase Mapper, HCI Platform for Materials Discovery

Junwen Bai, Yexiang Xue, Johan Bjorck, Ronan Le Bras, Brendan Rappazzo, Richard Bernstein, Santosh K. Suram, Robert Bruce van Dover, John M. Gregoire, Carla P. Gomes. Phase Mapper: Accelerating Materials Discovery with AI. AI Mag. 39(1): 15-26 (2018) [PDF], Cover Article

Yexiang Xue, Junwen Bai, Ronan Le Bras, Brendan Rappazzo, Richard Bernstein, Johan Bjorck, Liane Longpre, Santosh K. Suram, Robert Bruce van Dover, John M. Gregoire, Carla P. Gomes. Phase-Mapper: An AI Platform to Accelerate High Throughput Materials Discovery. AAAI 2017: 4635-4643 [PDF] Won Innovation Application Award