Cornell Tech has appointed Rob Brachman its new director of the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute. Brachman was formerly Yahoo’s chief scientist and head of Yahoo Labs, where he oversaw Yahoo’s science activities worldwide and provided leadership at the intersection of research, applied science and academic partnerships. A computer scientist, he is known for his work in the field of artificial intelligence.

The Jacobs Institute is the result of an academic partnership between Cornell University and the Technion Israel-Institute of Technology at Cornell Tech. It strives to be an institution with a non-traditional and multidisciplinary approach to research, education and entrepreneurship. The Runway Startup Postdoc Program, part business school, part research institution, part startup incubator, is one such example.

Brachman graduated from Princeton in 1971 with a BSE in electrical engineering and received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard in 1977. Before his ten-year employment at Yahoo, where he contributed to the founding of Yahoo Research and was the creator of the company’s academic relations group, he was director of the Information Processing Technology Office at DARPA. Earlier in his career he was at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs. Brachman has served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and is currently on the board of the Computing Research Association and an advisor to Segovia Technology.