On February 27, 2024, Corey Toler-Franklin, assistant professor of computer science, gave a school-wide talk at her alma mater, Princeton University, where she was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in computer science. At the event, titled “AI for Social Change,’” she discussed her research encompassing artificial intelligence (AI) and social change. The Princeton Engineering event celebrated black women in CS and engineering from different generations.
Toler-Franklin also spoke about her journey in the field, the machine learning algorithm project she worked on while at the university, and her current areas of research: computer graphics, vision, and AI for microscopy, spectroscopy, and multispectral imaging. Her current research initiatives, each deeply impactful in their own way, include, among others, developing neural networks to detect cancerous tumors in tissue biopsies and using multispectral imaging/analysis and machine learning to analyze data at the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.