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Alumni share their experience at Cornell Tech and how the school has prepared them to work in the technology industry.


Cornell Tech is building a diverse environment of academics and practitioners who excel at imagining, researching and building digitally-enabled products and services to directly address societal and commercial needs, particularly in areas that both draw on and contribute to the vibrancy of New York City.


In Startup Studio, students come together in teams to take an idea and turn it into a real product.


Cornell Tech alumni startup GitLinks was recently acquired by global software company Infor according to a release on the company’s website.

GitLinks was founded by Ian Folau, CEO and Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’16, and Nwamaka Imasogie, CTO and Master in Computer Science ’16. The company began as an enterprise application to help rank and qualify programs many developers rely upon daily and grew into a robust software to automate application security and license compliance.

After winning a Cornell Tech Startup Award in 2016, GitLinks participated in the Friends of eBay and later moved the company headquarters to Austin, TX.


By Chad Dickerson, Cornell Tech Fellow

I’ve been formally involved with Cornell Tech as a Fellow for about a year now and it has been super-fun having a front-row seat to seeing a major university rise on an island in the middle of New York City, the greatest city in the world. Cornell Tech’s major point of differentiation from most graduate institutions is its Studio program. All the components of the program are described on the web site but to really boil it down, the Studio program is about combining a top-notch academic foundation with the real-world experience of building actual products and services with multidisciplinary teams (design, engineering, business, and legal).

The Studio program has had an excellent Startup Studio track for years, led by David Tisch. Many students coming out of Cornell Tech will work for larger companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) and I’m excited to write that I will be co-leading and co-teaching a new track to complement Startup Studio with my good friend, former colleague, and Google exec Bradley Horowitz. We’re calling it BigCo Studio:

In this class, students will learn how to successfully navigate the opportunities and challenges of a BigCo (Big Company) and build products in a complex environment at scale. Students will also learn about how business development, M&A, and other corporate activities complement, and sometimes compete with product teams to drive larger strategic initiatives forward in BigCos. Students will work in teams matched with a real-world opportunity and advisor from a BigCo. Teams will then build and pitch a working product in three sprints culminating in a final presentation and demo. The class will include lectures and prominent guest speakers from the industry.

BigCos and their products and platforms are increasingly central to our lives, even if you’re a startup (think Gmail, AWS, iOS, and Google Cloud, just to name a few). Chances are you are using one or more BigCo products to read this post. There is a vibrant ecosystem of blogs, books, and information about the startup world but very little practical guidance out there about life in BigCos. We’re looking forward to covering the good, the bad, and the ugly of building products that matter in complex orgs. We’ll be sharing the dark arts of life in a BigCo that we spent the bulk of our careers learning the hard way.

I am particularly excited to be working on this with Bradley, whose professional expertise I respect deeply but also someone I love like a brother. We went through some serious wars at Yahoo! while having an incredible amount of fun. We last worked together in 2008 and since then, Bradley has gone on to run product for some of the most-used consumer products in the world at Google and I joined a little startup called Etsy and grew it into a BigCo. I can’t imagine partnering with someone more suited to the work and it feels like getting a band back together.

If your company is interested in working with our students, first read the How it Works and FAQ sections on the BigCo Studio page and feel free to reach out. If you’re a leader in a BigCo and there’s a topic you really wish students knew more about when they joined your company, let me know. My email is firstname.lastname@cornell.edu.

This blog post was republished from Chad Dickerson’s blog


Biotia, a Runway Startup at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, announced a partnership with Bumrungrad International Hospital to pilot their artificial intelligence (AI), sequencing-based technology to revolutionize pathogen and drug resistance detection.

The organizations announced the partnership in a joint release, detailing the threat of antimicrobial resistance in hospitals:

Antimicrobial resistance of microorganisms is an increasing international threat. The WHO has called for urgent initiatives to address the situation, including the use of novel diagnostics and approaches to identify organisms and their antibiotic resistance characteristics more rapidly. These improvements will give clinicians the relevant information to provide more timely and appropriate treatment for nascent and established infections. Early and appropriate intervention will improve patient outcomes.

Hospitals still largely use culturing to identify pathogens and antibiotic resistance, technology which has not fundamentally changed since the 1800s. While useful, this approach is slow and labor-intensive, and often results in delays in diagnosis or even undiagnosed cases. However, next-generation sequencing (NGS) combined with microbial identification software offers a cutting edge, faster, and more accurate solution to identify and characterize microorganisms. This technology has immediate applications in infectious disease diagnostics and outcomes, and pathogen screening for surveillance to decrease the high rates of hospital-acquired infections, which currently affect up to 1 in 25 hospital patients (CDC-HAI (US)).

Biotia has created a suite of solutions for hospitals to rapidly identify pathogens, antimicrobial resistance, and virulence markers more rapidly and robustly than standard solutions. In this year-long collaboration, Biotia will implement its pathogen detection solutions including optimized laboratory techniques, advanced sequencing technology created by Oxford Nanopore, Biotia AI software, ChelseaTM and databases, with a subset of samples also being orthogonally validated by culture, PCR, and Illumina sequencing. “At Biotia we specialize in translating cutting edge pathogen research into commercial products for hospitals,” said Biotia CEO, Dr. Niamh O’Hara. “We are excited to work with Bumrungrad International Hospital, a forward-looking hospital, to move this technology towards wide clinical adoption.”

Read the release on the Biotia website.



The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, CA recently announced collaboration with Cornell Tech researchers, led by Professor Helen Nissenbaum, as part of their new NSA-sponsored “lablet” focused on security and privacy research.

The group’s projects will focus on capturing and understanding peoples’ complex attitudes toward privacy in real-world situations. Nissenbaum’s theory of privacy as contextual integrity explains that our expectations for privacy are a product of social and situational contexts. However, the devices and systems that now play an important part in our social lives don’t take into account the ways that information flows in these contexts. Studying the meaning of “context” for both people and systems can help designers create systems that understand contexts and norms in the same way people do.

The researchers hope that their findings will help designers, engineers, and policy-makers build and manage systems in ways that are more privacy-protective. “This ‘lablet’ provides a rare and invaluable opportunity to integrate scientific, empirical, and policy insights with conceptions of privacy that are conceptually rigorous and ethically meaningful,” Nissenbaum said.


Professor Helen Nissenbaum recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to expand understanding of privacy and technology. The project, a collaboration with professors Serge Egelman at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley and Norman Sadeh at Carnegie Mellon University, builds on Nissenbaum’s pioneering theory of privacy as contextual integrity.

The project aims to understand and improve the privacy controls that are built into the technical systems that we use every day. Most of the time, our apps and devices understand what level of privacy we would like by giving us notice (“we are collecting your data”) and allowing us to consent (“do you agree?”). The notice-and-consent model has been the norm for decades, but the introduction of mobile and IoT devices – which often don’t have interfaces that allow for notice or consent – has changed the game.

Designing privacy controls that consider the context in which devices are used is the next step toward effective privacy for the IoT age. Nissenbaum’s project will begin by implementing user studies to increase understanding of privacy as contextual integrity in real-world environments. It will then use data-driven approaches to expand on methods that help computer systems understand contexts, how they change, and what kind of data sharing is appropriate in which context. Last, the research team will work to design and validate new types of privacy control that are more respectful of contextual norms.


 

New technologies are now faster, cheaper, and easier to develop than ever before. But such rapid and often unchecked innovation can sometimes lead to harmful outcomes.

For Frederic Rubinstein ’52, LLB ’55, “The right kind of entrepreneurship and technology should make a significant positive contribution to improving life on our planet.”

Having devoted a substantial portion of his legal career to startup and technology companies, Rubinstein is “enthused about Cornell’s aggressive entry into the tech arena.” He sees Cornell Tech’s diverse coalition of academics, students, and creators as a golden opportunity to address some of the biggest issues of the day, given that we live in “difficult times, culturally, politically, and economically.” Rubinstein wants to make it easier for students to transform their best ideas and most promising products and services into viable and socially responsible tech companies.Frederic Rubinstein

That’s why he and his wife Susan gave a $1-million gift to the campus to establish the Frederic and Susan Rubinstein Fund for Social Benefit in Entrepreneurial Programs. The Fund will support efforts to foster active and intelligent civic engagement by improving health and education—ambitious students will have more opportunities than ever to create socially impactful projects to make a real difference.

Rubinstein’s gift will help propel a widely shared ethos across campus.

Aaron Holiday, a Managing Entrepreneurial Officer who works closely with Cornell Tech spinout startups and the school’s Startup Studio program, shares the Rubinsteins’ commitment to promoting social responsibility in new tech. An ethic of social responsibility is, Holiday said, “critically important to the work that we do,” especially in a world where tech is embedded in every aspect of society and has an enormous impact on an ever-growing number of people.

“When we first started creating studio startups, just like everyone else, we were really excited about drones, virtual reality, blockchain, and cryptocurrency,” Holiday said. “But what has been most rewarding, and surprising, as a person who’s been involved in helping to build all of this, is students’ strong interest in purpose-driven companies.”

In recent years, Cornell Tech students have conceived of and launched products to make mobile phones more accessible to illiterate people, make speech therapy more accessible to children with speech impediments, and make it easier for special education teachers to track data that help improve outcomes for students with autism.

Holiday is particularly proud of how the Cornell Tech Startup Awards, which offer winning teams up to $100,000 in post-academic, pre-seed funding, have helped allow students who “might not traditionally have had an opportunity to build a company to have a swing at bat.”

In addition to creating opportunities for such students, Holiday said, questions about social entrepreneurship and social responsibility are embedded in the Startup Award application itself.

“We want students from the very beginning, at the earliest stages of a company’s formation, to think about social responsibility, diversity and inclusion, and the ethical impact of tech on the world,” Holiday said.

One such venture, Full Plate, is an online service designed to help low-income customers access nutritious, fully prepared meals. Co-founder Ryan Lupton, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’18, realized an entire customer segment was being overlooked by meal delivery services such as Blue Apron, Green Chef, and HelloFresh. “We wanted to understand how we could bring the same sort of convenience [provided by other meal delivery services], but also bring nutrition, and offer it at a price point that low-income customers and families could afford,” he said.

Co-founder Chris Stuart, a Parsons Design and Technology MFA student, agrees, and added, “My motivation to create Full Plate came in part from seeing how my family and the people of Puerto Rico were struggling even to get food on their plates after Hurricane Maria, let alone eat nutritiously. The name ‘Full Plate’ comes from my desire to help bring full, healthy meals to people’s tables.”

Although Full Plate is launching in New York City, Stuart would love to bring it to his home of Puerto Rico one day. “What’s important is that being part of a social entrepreneurship team we’re not measuring our success based solely in terms of what’s profitable,” he said. “Success for me and Ryan means that we’ve improved people’s lives. That’s how I define social entrepreneurship: we’re doing this for the social impact and to improve people’s health and better their everyday lives.”

Like Holiday, Lupton said much of the campus energy for socially conscious projects comes from the students themselves. “The idea and the importance of social entrepreneurship on Cornell Tech’s campus is really led by students who are, for the most part, digitally native,” he said. “And they have a clear vision for how they want technology to be used in a way that improves lives. That student-led initiative is a big piece of what I value about Cornell Tech.”

Both Lupton and Stuart are grateful for the opportunity to pour their energy and drive into socially conscious entrepreneurship. ”What I value most,” said Stuart, “is the opportunity to work with people from diverse backgrounds, meet all these people with all these different skills, and figure out how they can combine to make one amazing startup.”