Education
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Aug 2024 – Present
- Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Computer Science ∧ Mathematics, Sep 2020 – May 2024
Experience
- Visiting Researcher, Computation and Theory, HHMI Janelia Research Campus (2025–Present)
- ML Research Engineer Intern, YRIKKA, Inc. (Summer 2025)
- Researcher, PEESE Lab, Cornell University (2023–2025)
- Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, Cornell Bowers CIS (2021–2024)
- Software Engineer Intern, Amazon (Summers 2021–2024)
Research
- Kai A. Horstmann, Ethan Lin, Alice A. Robie, Jennifer J. Sun, Kristin Branson. “A case study of evaluating AI agents on a neuroscience data-to-discovery pipeline.” Third Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2026. (to appear)
- Xuefei Wang, Kai A. Horstmann, Ethan Lin, Jonathan Chen, Alexander R. Farhang, Sophia Stiles, Atharva Sehgal, Jonathan Light, David Van Valen, Yisong Yue, Jennifer J. Sun. “Simple Agents Outperform Experts in Biomedical Imaging Workflow Optimization.” Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2026, pp. 13680–13690.
- Kai A. Horstmann, Maxim Clouser, Kia Khezeli. “Inference-Time Scaling of Diffusion Models for Infrared Data Generation.” NeurIPS 2025 Workshop: Learning to Sense, 2025.
- Xuefei Wang, Jonathan Chen, Alexander R. Farhang, Sophia Stiles, Kai A. Horstmann, Atharva Sehgal, Jonathan Light, David Van Valen, Yisong Yue, Jennifer J. Sun. “Agentic Superoptimization of Bioimaging Analysis Workflows.” COLM Workshop: LLM for Scientific Discovery, 2025.
- Guangyao Chen, Kai A. Horstmann, Zhilong Wang, Fengqi You. “Automated Essential Concept Discovery for Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection.” CVPR Workshop on Visual Anomaly and Novelty Detection, 2025. (Spotlight)
- Abdulelah S. Alshehri, Kai A. Horstmann, Fengqi You. “Versatile Deep Learning Pipeline for Transferable Chemical Data Extraction.” Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 64(15):5888–5899, 2024.