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By Ryan Sydnor, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’19

I made so many new and diverse friends this summer in gorgeous Ithaca, NY. This is where my classmates and I spent the first three months of our Johnson Cornell Tech MBA program. A common goal that unites us is fusing technology with business and creative thinking—a core tenet of the Cornell Tech MBA. We also share the premise that the rapid pace of innovation in the digital age calls for a new approach to the way we learn, collaborate, and craft our experience.

With that in mind, as our MBA Class of 2019 approached the end of our summer semester in Ithaca, we wanted to crystallize our experiences by reflecting on what had gone well, what could be improved, and what actions we should take going forward.

For those with experience on an agile team, these three categories likely sound familiar. They are the key tenets of a retrospective. Retrospectives give teams recurring opportunities to reflect, bond, and collaborate to shape positive, incremental change. We decided to apply the best practices from the tech industry to our cohort in order to accomplish the following goals:

  1. Generate feedback and action items for individuals, our cohort, and Cornell Tech
  2. Spend time together reflecting, bonding, and collaborating
  3. Learn about agile teams and retrospectives
  4. Eat pizza!

We drew inspiration from around the internet on ways to run effective large retrospectives. Here’s a quick summary of what we did at Cornell’s eHub in 1.5 hours:

10 minutes: Intro and eat pizza

25 minutes: Mini-retrospectives
We ran mini-retrospectives in groups of about four to eight people
where everyone shared their thoughts on “what’s gone well?” and “what can be improved?”

10 minutes: Sharing themes
Each group shared their top two themes.

15 minutes: Action items
We formed new groups to come up with action items for the themes we identified.

25 minutes: Present
We gave quick presentations to say what actions we’re going to take.

5 minutes: Get started!
People volunteered to own and help with each action item.

Retrospective takeaways

Over 1.5 hours, we generated thousands of thoughts about what’s gone well and what can be improved. Here are just a few:

  • “Cornell’s campus in Ithaca is Gorges”
  • “The temperature in our classrooms fluctuated too much”
  • “The fast paced curriculum helped me improve my prioritization and time management”
  • “Communicating on Slack was instrumental”
  • “High diversity of talent and culture in the cohort”
  • “Sharing is Caring was amazing”

We then whittled down those thoughts into themes and prioritized the ones we thought would be the most impactful. Here are a few examples:

  • Student-organized groups
  • Culture of continuous feedback
  • Networking outside of our cohort

For each of those themes, we generated concrete action items. For example, one action item is to support Emily, our classmate, in scaling the Sharing is Caring initiative on the cross-disciplinary Roosevelt Island campus. (Sharing is Caring is an incredible weekly meeting where students share their expertise and wisdom with the class.)

After the retrospective we all voted on a scale of one to 10 as to whether or not we should do another retrospective in the future, and the result was a net promoter score of 83! Here’s what that actually sounds like:

  • “Super helpful, collaborative, and actionable.”
  • “I found it inspiring and enjoyable.”
  • “We came up with meaningful conclusions and action items that were based on a variety of perspectives.”

We have continued discussing, coordinating, and making progress on each action item in our cohort’s Slack team. We’re looking forward to continue growing together by shaping the Cornell Tech experience on Roosevelt Island for not only ourselves but also future students!

Ryan is an entrepreneurial product engineer with eight years of full-stack experience leading agile teams to build products that people love. Check out some of the work he’s done at https://ryansydnor.com.

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By Melanie Lefkowitz

Deborah Estrin, the Robert V. Tishman ’37 professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and of healthcare policy and research at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been awarded a 2018 MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her innovative work using mobile devices and data to address social challenges.

Estrin, who also serves as an associate dean at Cornell Tech, will receive a no-strings-attached award of $625,000 over five years – widely known as the “genius grant.”

“I was and remain very humbled and grateful,” said Estrin, who thought at first the foundation was calling her to provide a reference for someone else. “I feel a sense of commitment to do good by it, and to live up to it.”

The MacArthur Foundation recognized Estrin for demonstrating “a remarkable ability to anticipate the applicability of technological advances to a variety of fields.” In recent years, her work has focused on what she calls “small data” – the digital breadcrumbs we leave as we go about our lives – and how they can be leveraged for such uses as personalized health care management, without sacrificing privacy.

The foundation hailed Estrin as among the first to see the potential in using the digital traces from personal electronic devices such as cell phones, GPS and fitness trackers, and tools like email and online maps and shopping, for participatory mobile health.

“It’s not just where we’ve been or whether we’re walking or sitting. It’s the language we use, it’s how much time we spend binging on whatever’s on at night, the news we consume, the sentiments in the things we post,” Estrin said. “We are all so individual in ways that our genetics alone can’t predict. The small data from mobiles and from online interactions are rich sources of data that can close the gap between what we are born with and what we suffer from.”

Estrin directs Cornell Tech’s Small Data Lab, where researchers develop platforms and applications for management and use of personal data, such as using retrospective data to generate personalized models that can detect changes in health in response to treatment or disease progression. She also founded the Health Tech Hub at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute.

“Deborah Estrin has been a trailblazer and pioneer throughout her career, and her current focus in health tech offers a terrific example: Through her work and research in small data, she is improving the lives of patients, doctors, caregivers and all of us,” said Dan Huttenlocher, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech. “My colleagues and I congratulate Deborah on this great and very well-deserved honor. Through her leadership at Cornell Tech as associate dean and the director of the Health Tech program in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Deborah has established the new campus as an international leader in tech for social impact, and she is driving the next generation of innovators who will revolutionize the health care industry.”

Huttenlocher, who is chair of the board of directors of the MacArthur Foundation, was not involved in selecting the grant awardees.

In 2011, Estrin co-founded the nonprofit startup Open mHealth, an open-source software architecture that can use various types of small data to build customized applications addressing specific health conditions.

She said privacy considerations are an important part of her work, and believes it’s possible to leverage insights from digital traces without overly compromising individual privacy.

“The same data that is useful to help understand how someone is responding to a therapy or a drug is also data that can be very exposing about them. I am interested in developing new ways to put these data and technologies to use in a way that is more privacy-aware from the perspective of the user and context than is typical in our social media-dominated online lives,” she said.

Estrin received her B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley (1980) and her M.S. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining Cornell’s faculty in 2013, she was a professor in the computer science department at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 2002 to 2012, she was the founding director of the Center for Embedded Network Sensing, a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center headquartered at UCLA.

“I’ve been working as a technologist throughout these amazing decades in which digital technology has evolved so much and become so pervasive. The opportunities for addressing societal needs have been plentiful, at the same time that the technology raises its own social challenges,” Estrin said.

At this point in her career, she said the award affords her the “license and impetus to really dig in, rather than take a back seat.” She hopes to use the recognition from the fellowship to put her ideas into wider practice.

“I believe we can use small data to make chronic disease prevention and management personalized, scalable and affordable, but it’s not as if you point this out to people and it becomes true,” she said. “I hope I can take advantage of this opportunity to really navigate what it’s going to take to make it true. To make it a reality, not just a possibility.”

This article originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.

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Computers make decisions 1,000 times faster than humans’ most automatic, instinctual reactions. So as algorithms exert more and more control over our daily lives, how can humans maintain oversight of machines that deliberate at a pace we can barely comprehend?

This is among the core issues being explored at the Sept. 28-29 Speed Conference, hosted by Cornell Tech’s Digital Life Initiative (DLI), a cross-disciplinary and cross-campus program aimed at uniting students and scholars to analyze technology’s impact on society. Faculty from Cornell’s Ithaca and New York City campuses, as well as Stanford University, Columbia University, Northeastern University and other schools, will speak on panels examining the role of technology and speed in areas like content moderation, finance, warfare and policing, and labor and manufacturing.

“There’s a very strong sense that, in all the important ways of applying technology, everything’s going to be fine as long as we can insert a human in the loop,” said Helen Nissenbaum, Cornell Tech professor of information science, director of DLI and co-chair of the Speed Conference. “What we are worried about is that because humans and machines think and process at such enormously different speeds, this particular protection that we think we can build in is actually infeasible. And that raises all sorts of societal questions, ethical questions, legal questions and probably technical questions, too.”

Panelists at the Speed Conference will include Nissenbaum; conference co-chair James Grimmelmann, professor of law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School; Steven Jackson, associate professor of information science; and Wendy Ju, assistant professor of information science in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech.

“There’s a real mismatch between how fast computers operate and how fast people react,” Grimmelmann said. “We want to come collaboratively across fields to understand the place for humans to respond to this new challenge.”

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The Speed Conference is one of the first major events from DLI, which launched in 2017. The initiative also holds a weekly seminar series at Cornell Tech, open to the public, focusing on the development and application of digital technology. A DLI doctoral fellowship began this semester, drawing students from across Cornell’s campuses. As the effort continues ramping up, Nissenbaum said she hopes DLI can support cross-disciplinary research projects on related topics, as well as additional classes.

“Our goal is not necessarily to question the activity of technological development – we’re not opposed to that – it’s more to raise awareness that tech can be developed in many different directions, and it can take many different shapes,” she said. “I think many people just accept technology and think it’s God-given, but they may not be aware that choices are made all along the way to shape the technology from the very beginning. Especially with students, I want them to be aware that every step of the way, from the beginning, you can integrate ethical and societal thinking.”

The Speed Conference is supported by Microsoft.

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 Public-private partnership building the next generation of women in tech in New York

Winternship program will double in 2019 — Deadline for companies to join is October 19th

NEW YORK — Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, Cornell Tech and the City University of New York (CUNY) today announced the second annual winter internship program — the Winternship — as part of the Women in Technology and Entrepreneurship in NY (WiTNY) initiative. The Winternship is a paid three-week January internship for CUNY female students in their freshman or sophomore year who are studying computer science or related fields. The first year was incredibly successful with 54% of the Winterns receiving a coveted paid internship the following summer at tech companies — a critical step to landing a job after graduation — compared to 3.5% before the Winternship program started.

Building on the successful inaugural year of the program, Cornell Tech and CUNY are encouraging more companies to participate in the Winternship program and become a part of growing the women in tech pipeline. Last year, 46 companies hosted 177 women from CUNY including Mastercard, Bitly, LinkedIn, Verizon, Citi, Dow Jones, Grand Central Tech and many others. The next round of Winternships will occur during CUNY’s winter break in January 2019 and the final number of women accepted into the program will depend on the number of participating companies. The universities’ goal is to double the program. Interested companies can get involved by visiting http://witny.org/. WiTNY will also support the participation of qualifying non-profit organizations by sponsoring/paying the salaries for the Winterns.

This year, Winternships are part of Women.NYC, a new City program that connects women to educational and employment opportunities, and resources to advance their professional and personal lives.

“We’re focused on making NYC the world’s best city for women to succeed – and that means growing opportunities for women in tech,” said Alicia Glen, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development. “Winternship’s success proves that tech leaders are eager to bring more women into the tech workforce, and they want to do it here in NYC.”

“Cornell Tech is proud to announce its second year partnering with CUNY and dozens of companies who are dedicated to closing the gender gap in tech in New York,” said Judith Spitz, WiTNY’s Founder and Program Director at Cornell Tech. “The Winternship was tremendously successful last year and we’re looking forward to expanding the program to more companies across multiple industries. The results clearly show that giving these young women a ‘foot in the door’ by placing them into top-notch mini-internships early in their college years can change the trajectory of their lives and help change the face of tech in New York.”

“The Winternship program puts WiTNY on the cutting edge of efforts to launch tech careers for women across New York City and beyond,” said Andrea Shapiro Davis, Associate Vice Chancellor at CUNY.  “Winternships offer New York City companies the unique opportunity to benefit from the great work of CUNY’s smart, talented and diverse students, while giving our students the chance to work for some of the country’s premier companies. Last year, dozens of Winternship participants were offered highly sought-after summer internships at those companies and this type of success is unprecedented.”

“The Winternship program is an example of how New York City is leading the way in creating an inclusive tech ecosystem, and shows how organizations like Cornell Tech and CUNY can help drive our city towards this goal,” said Julie Samuels, Executive Director of Tech:NYC. “In its first year, the Wintership program did a great job connecting women with opportunities across the New York tech sector, and we’re excited to see that grow this year.”

Short internships early in college careers give these young CUNY women pivotal and invaluable first-hand experiences, build their skills and confidence, and give them strong resumes that are critical to landing that first paid summer internship — which is known to be the surest on-ramp to landing a job upon graduation.

WiTNY is a strategic partnership between Cornell Tech and CUNY, and supported by corporate sponsors including Verizon, Accenture, Mastercard, Citi Foundation, Aetna, IBM, KPMG, JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse, Xerox and others. WITNY’s strategy is to encourage more women to study computer science and related disciplines by working with CUNY faculty to offer innovative introductory curricula — both undergraduate courses as well as a unique summer program called the Summer Guild for women in between their last year of high school and first year at CUNY — and retain them through community events, soft skills training, career immersion via high tech internships and Winternships and programming to connect them to a robust community of tech-driven women in New York.

WiTNY fits into a broader strategy of bringing more young New Yorkers into the growing tech industry. The City of New York’s efforts have included the Tech Talent Pipeline, a program that partners leading tech companies with private and public universities including Cornell, NYU, Pratt, and CUNY; and CUNY 2X Tech, a program that will double the number of CUNY tech Bachelor’s degree recipients by 2022.

Host a wintern

About Cornell Tech

Cornell Tech brings together faculty, business leaders, tech entrepreneurs and students in a catalytic environment to produce visionary results grounded in significant needs that will reinvent the way we live in the digital age. The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute embodies the academic partnership between the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Cornell University on the Cornell Tech campus.

From 2012-2017, the campus was temporarily located in Google’s New York City building. In fall 2017, 30 world-class faculty and almost 300 graduate students moved to the first phase of Cornell Tech’s permanent campus on Roosevelt Island, continuing to conduct groundbreaking research, collaborate extensively with tech-oriented companies and organizations and pursue their own startups. When fully completed, the campus will include two million square feet of state-of-the-art buildings, over two acres of open space, and will be home to more than 2,000 graduate students and hundreds of faculty and staff.

About CUNY

The City University of New York is the nation’s leading urban public university. Founded in 1847, CUNY counts 13 Nobel Prize and 23 MacArthur (“Genius”) grant winners among its alumni. CUNY students, alumni and faculty have garnered scores of other prestigious honors over the years in recognition of historic contributions to the advancement of the sciences, business, the arts and myriad other fields.  The University comprises 25 institutions: 11 senior colleges, seven community colleges, William E. Macaulay Honors College at CUNY, CUNY Graduate Center, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, CUNY School of Law, CUNY School of Professional Studies and CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.  The University serves more than 275,000 degree-seeking students. CUNY offers online baccalaureate and master’s degrees through the School of Professional Studies.

About Women.NYC

Launched in May 2018, Women.NYC is a new City initiative to support the advancement of women in their careers and help make New York City the world’s best city for women for to succeed. The website provides access to key resources and tools that will help advance women in the workplace, including business funding, legal assistance, training, and mentorship. Women.NYC was created in response to known gender disparities in the workplace and motivates NYC women to make “power moves” to further their careers and get equal pay for equal work. Learn more at Women.NYC.

About the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline

Launched by the Mayor in 2014, the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline is the City’s tech Industry Partnership, designed to support the inclusive growth of the NYC tech sector and prepare New Yorkers for 21st century jobs. Incubated and supported by the NYC Department of Small Business Services, the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline works with 175 companies, 16 local colleges, and additional public and private partners to define employer needs, develop training and education models to meet these needs, and scale solutions throughout the City, delivering quality talent for the City’s businesses and quality jobs for New Yorkers. Learn more information at http://www.techtalentpipeline.nyc/ or email team@techtalent.nyc.

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In a recent article, Tech:NYC featured five Cornell Tech startups they think you should keep an eye on.

Less than a decade later, Cornell Tech was born. It now has a full campus on Roosevelt Island, and it’s quickly become an anchor for the New York tech community. As of mid-2018, more than 40 startups had been formed on the Cornell Tech campus. Together, those companies have raised a total of $46 million in funding, employ more than 170 people, and we’re glad to say, 93 percent of them are headquartered in NYC.

Tech:NYC is proud to work with Cornell Tech, along with Bloomberg, to present a speaker series leaders in New York tech, and tonight, we’re kicking off the next series of events with Zola CEO Shan-Lyn Ma. To mark the new season, we’re highlighting five startups that were created and cultivated at Cornell Tech.

Read a Q&A with Crater, Cabinet, OnSiteIQ, Biotia, and Tatch on the Tech:NYC website.

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One in 59 children in the United States is born on the autism spectrum, which is a 424 percent increase from autism rates in 2001. Given this rapid increase in autism diagnoses and the length of school and training for autism caregivers, it’s not surprising that there is a catastrophic shortage of therapists and educators to help these kids learn and thrive. Every hour of a therapist’s day is needed to treat children, do treatment analysis, and communicate with parents. Instead, much of their day is spent on paperwork.

Thread Learning aims to radically improve that process.

Two years ago, Greg Brill, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’16, and Sam Raudabaugh, Master in Computer Science ’16, won a $100,000 investment from Cornell Tech to create an electronic health record for the therapists and other caretakers working with children with autism.

Until recently, therapists and teachers primarily analyzed and tracked students’ progress with a pen and paper in a painstaking process. Brill and Raudabaugh’s product Thread allows them to collect, graph, and analyze academic and behavioral data on an intuitive mobile application and online portal.

Through the power of technology, caregivers can now coordinate care for the first time by sending instructions and automatic progress reports to parents and other caregivers. Thread even gives caregivers reminders and advice to help increase the quality of instruction. Brill and Raudabaugh are now hoping the data collected through the platform proves that coordinated care among caregivers along with improved parental involvement will increase the rate of learning in the children.

At the same time, Thread also helps therapists and teachers save many hours per week in paperwork, which opens up more time with the children.

“Our goal is to bring efficient, top-quality care to the millions of people around the world on the autism spectrum,” said Brill, who worked in autism education prior to pursuing his MBA.

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A sample of a Thread chart tracking student progress.

Only 3 months after the company started, the Thread platform was ready to deploy as a successful pilot in New York City autism classrooms. This traction, and the fact that the system was already piloted successfully in real classrooms, aided the team when they presented for one of Cornell Tech’s Startup Awards in front of 300+ audience of venture capitalists, students, investors, and judges. Since then, Brill and Raudabaugh’s dream of doing social good while building a business has evolved far beyond their initial vision. After Cornell and the success of their first product, they raised an additional $1.23 million Seed Round to build a second product for practice management, to help simplify the complicated world of insurance reimbursement, session notes, and healthcare management.

“Everyone knows someone affected by complicated insurance systems,” said Raudabaugh. He feels good about building a program that will allow insurance companies to more efficiently understand and process claims, reducing stress for the affected families.

Thread Learning’s team and business are growing quickly. They recently added one of the largest autism therapy providers in the United States to their customer list, Proud Moments ABA. Thread Learning expects to add at least eight New York area schools to its customer list in September and expand to ten campuses of NYC Autism Charter School this school year. They also hope to hire two more employees to add to their four full-time and five part-time workers.

An Emphasis On Simplifying User Experience

As soon as they met on the first day of Cornell Tech’s Admitted Students Day, Brill and Raudabaugh knew they wanted to collaborate.

“I even wrote about autism in my personal statement for Cornell Tech,” said Raudabaugh, whose family includes teachers and computer scientists. “I was inspired by the inclusive technologies I saw for people with autism on the app store, but talking to Greg, I realized that there were still huge problems in autism that needed solving.”

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Greg Brill, Thread Learning co-founder and Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’16, presents during Open Studio in May 2016

Cornell Tech’s curriculum encourages students to solve problems from a customer’s perspective by focusing on user feedback and experimentation. For example, Brill and Raudabaugh worked closely with their potential customers and found that therapists want to be able to work on multiple lesson plans with multiple children at the same time because it’s been shown to better engage children, leading to measurably improved outcomes. Thread allows teachers to instruct and measure up to six lesson plans simultaneously with many students .

“That inspired us to make being user-friendly a core value of the company,” said Raudabaugh.

Despite advances in inclusive technology, the digital revolution has largely passed by the autism space. Thread Learning aims to fix that by creating an intuitive and easy-to-use platform that helps therapists and teachers provide cutting-edge care.

“Everyone in the space does instruction a little differently,” said Brill. “The fact that Thread is built to be super intuitive means we can support all the different instructional methodologies that our customers use.”

Unlike other products, Thread tries to support all special-needs therapists and teachers, including behavioral analysts who use a variety of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) based methodologies. In recent years, ABA has gained widespread adoption from government and insurance, leading to a triple-digit increase in the number of children receiving autism-related services. Thread’s aforementioned multiple-student data tracking surpasses competing products built under the false assumption that caretakers are testing one data point with one student at a time.

The platform’s intuitive user interface was created with the help of Stephen Lang, the User Experience designer-in-residence at Cornell Tech’s The Foundry. “Cornell Tech gave us access to a great network,” said Raudabaugh.

What’s Next?

After seeing success in home care, clinics, and classrooms, the Thread Learning team now has its eyes set on making scalable improvements to the autism ecosystem. With Thread, they are collecting millions of data points on how children with special needs learn and now plan on using data analytics and deep learning to create insights for caregivers.  

“Almost everything we know about special-needs therapy was learned in studies of small groups of children, which takes years to conduct and disseminate,” said Brill. “We’ll be able to look at how hundreds of thousands of children learn, which I think will give us real insight into things like path-of-treatment, learning styles, and instructional techniques.”

Thread Learning’s mission has a  global scope. “There are probably at least 7 million people around the globe on the autism spectrum,” said Brill. “While modern treatment is extremely effective, the vast majority of people living with autism aren’t getting it. We want to push the boundaries of cutting-edge care, while also using technology to bring the best research, the best tools, and the best care to people all around the world.”

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Cornell Tech Welcomes Josh Hartmann as CPO

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NEW YORK – Cornell Tech announced today that Josh Hartmann has joined the campus as its first Chief Practice Officer. In this position, Hartmann will be responsible for leading Cornell Tech academic activities that bridge graduate education and practical implementation. Previously, Hartmann held interdisciplinary leadership positions serving as former Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer at several tech companies including Amplify and Travelocity. He will bring a broad range of industry knowledge in travel, education, and media, to Cornell Tech.

“I’m delighted to welcome Josh to lead Cornell Tech’s mission fusing education and practice,” said Dan Huttenlocher, Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost, Cornell Tech. “His experience in spearheading growth at tech-driven companies will allow him to guide Cornell Tech’s hands-on curriculum. Josh is a thoughtful, inquisitive tech leader, who has worked in a variety of industries, and will serve as a valuable asset for Cornell Tech students.”

“I am honored to join the Cornell Tech team in its undertaking to create the next generations of leaders and technologies in New York City,” said Hartmann. “Cornell Tech’s thoughtful integration of practical skills into its curriculum will set graduates up for extraordinary success.”

Hartmann will serve as the primary practitioner faculty member at Cornell Tech dedicated to implementing and designing pragmatic courses and programs that will combine traditional graduate education and digital-age practice. Hartmann will also be leading and teaching in the Cornell Tech Studio—taking over for Greg Pass, former CTO of Twitter who has led the Studio as Chief Entrepreneurial Officer at Cornell Tech since its founding in 2012—an interdisciplinary curriculum which provides opportunities to develop, implement and build new product and business ideas, collaborate with classmates from across the Cornell Tech campus, and interact with innovators and thought leaders among New York City’s thriving technology and startup communities.

About Cornell Tech

Cornell Tech brings together faculty, business leaders, tech entrepreneurs and students in a catalytic environment to produce visionary results grounded in significant needs that will reinvent the way we live in the digital age. The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute embodies the academic partnership between the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Cornell University on the Cornell Tech campus.

From 2012-2017, the campus was temporarily located in Google’s New York City building. In fall 2017, 30 world-class faculty and almost 300 graduate students moved to the first phase of Cornell Tech’s permanent campus on Roosevelt Island, continuing to conduct groundbreaking research, collaborate extensively with tech-oriented companies and organizations and pursue their own startups. When fully completed, the campus will include two million square feet of state-of-the-art buildings, over two acres of open space, and will be home to more than 2,000 graduate students and hundreds of faculty and staff.

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Have you ever spent days packing for an exciting vacation, just to get to the airport without your passport? Everyone has had an uncomfortable moment when they realize they’ve forgotten to pack their wallet, left their keys on the kitchen counter, or arrived at school without their laptop.

A team of Cornell Tech students, and recent recipients of a Startup Award, built a solution for people to remember what they need for the day — before dashing out the door. The product is called Kipit, a suite of devices that automatically track the items a user has on hand and sends a reminder if they are about to leave anything behind.

Romoli Bakshi, Master in Computer Science ‘18, Adrien Cogny, Master in Operations Research and Information Engineering ‘18, Eliza Harkins, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ‘18, Sarah Le Cam, Master in Computer Science ‘18, and Zack Bruce, Parsons School of Design, originally started Kipit as an academic project, and are now turning their idea into a company.

Using technology to combat forgetfulness

To build Kipit, the team leveraged radio frequency identification (RFID) — a pre-existing technology — in a new way. RFID tags are similar to barcodes, but the digital data stored in the tags is detected using radio frequency waves and can be automatically scanned by a device without human interaction. In the past, large companies have used RFID tags to track inventory and companies like Tile have developed hardware products to help consumers track their personal possessions. Kipit is merging these two concepts together to create a personal inventory system.

When the Cornell Tech team interviewed Tile owners, they learned that they could solve a problem that Tile users still faced. With Tile, a person’s lost item must be within a certain radius and the app is reactive, not proactive, meaning that it helps someone find lost items, rather than ensuring the items don’t get lost in the first place.  In contrast, Kipit will notify someone when they need it most — before they’ve lost or forgotten to pack their item.

After testing paper and digital prototypes with their audience, the Kipit team used the skills they learned at Cornell Tech to build an Arduino RFID scanner — an open-source electronic prototyping platform that is used to create early-stage interactive electronic devices — and an iOS app. When someone puts the Kipit scanner into their bag and places RFID tags on must-have items like keys, a computer, wallet, and phone, the scanner will regularly scan the bag to make sure the items are present. Users input what they need to pack into their Kipit iOS app, which will send a notification if anything from the list is missing. The hardware and software connect via a low-energy Bluetooth connection.

Creating a foundation in Startup Studio

The team credits their Startup Studio experience with helping them develop their strategy, the technology they created, and finding people with the skills to create Kipit.

“[Startup Studio] was a great opportunity that doesn’t exist maybe anywhere else to bring together people of all different backgrounds to work on a project,” says Harkins. The team included people who “think differently and have different perspectives, but all with the same set of values [producing] quality work and building something that really helps people.”

The interdisciplinary nature of the team allows them to better understand how to build the technology and how to turn it into a profitable business. “We have solid fundamentals to work from. We understand the product, the market that we want to operate in, and how to raise money,” says Bruce.

Turning Kipit into a company after graduation

Receiving a Startup Award has supported the team’s transition from a classroom project to a startup. Kipit received pre-seed funding and a co-working space at Cornell Tech where they’ll be able to work with other Startup Studio Award winners. ”We will continue to get great mentorship from the professors and benefit from the interesting Cornell Tech community that is being built,” says Harkins.

Already hard at work, they have started to gauge interest in the product via their website and plan to form partnerships with fashion companies to gain mass appeal. They are currently preparing to begin alpha testing this summer and intend to establish initial manufacturing partnerships by the fall. The Kipit name is a nod to their startup’s goal to help people “keep it together.”

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Professor of Computer Science Vitaly Shmatikov‘s work on privacy in machine learning recently received the Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

This work was done by postdoctoral fellows Reza Shokri and Marco Stronati, PhD student Congzheng Song, and Professor Shmatikov.

In a recent blog post on Freedom to Tinker, Shmatikov discussed the findings of the study:

We uncovered multiple privacy and integrity problems in today’s ML pipelines, especially (1) online services such as Amazon ML and Google Prediction API that create ML models on demand for non-expert users, and (2) federated learning, aka collaborative learning, that lets multiple users create a joint ML model while keeping their data private (imagine millions of smartphones jointly training a predictive keyboard on users’ typed messages).”

Professor Shmatikov’s research group also received this award in 2008 and 2014.

Read the post on Freedom to Tinker

Read the paper

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