Projects

Masters of Engineering projects

Our technologists mentor and advise Cornell information science students pursuing their Masters degrees by giving them complex real-world challenges that lead to new features on the LII website. Working in teams of up to a dozen and sometimes as small as a single student, these students are able to take what they have learned in the classroom–and sometimes in previous employment–and tackle some of the most complex problems facing our technologists. The students save our staff valuable time experimenting with myriad ideas and then pursuing the more promising ones. A typical “MEng” project, upon completion, needs only a little refinement from our staff before it can be a feature, service, or other facet on the law.cornell.edu website. Dr. Sylvia Kwakye, Ph.D., leads our work with MEng students.

Recent MEng projects have included:

Exploring the potential of structural artificial intelligence to map and compare regulations across multiple states pertaining to the same topic;

Using semantic search techniques to distinguish when a search result, for example, contains a definition of the searched term, or appears in the full text of the returned result, or appears in a definition of a term that appears within the full text of a document;

Refining the software we use to extract definitions from the Code of Regulations to make it suitable to do the same task on the US Code;

Entity linking, which is a set of techniques that detect references to things in the world (such as people, places, animals, pharmaceuticals) and link them to data sources that provide more information about them.

News

MEng

M.Eng. Projects June 2024

The Legal Information Institute is an incredibly valuable, free source. I use it frequently in my work as a reporter and editor. I have included links to the Institute’s explanations in my articles far more times than I ever could count.

Rachel Hackney, Editor and Publisher