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Last month, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech hosted Cracking the Code: A WorkingNation Town Hall on Bridging the Cybersecurity Skills Gap.

The Town Hall focused on how employers can secure their tech infrastructure and protect data from attacks. Moderated by CNBC and MSNBC contributor Ron Insana, the discussion started with Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute  Professor Ari Juels who covered “the current state of cybersecurity and the insight on scaling security training throughout industries from product managers to the c-suite.”

Read more about the Cybersecurity Town Hall on Working Nation.

Photo: ClearSky CISO Patrick Heim (right) and Northwell Health CIO John Bosco (right) discuss solutions for developing cybersecurity professionals. Photo – Mayer Chalom/Working Nation


Crater is a startup that makes it easy and fun for community members to create meaningful video stories about local issues.

Imagine a group of high school seniors in your community is hosting a fundraiser for a neighborhood charity. The local paper interviewed them and you’ve shared the link on social media, but a brief video would be better since it’s much more compelling to see and hear the students describing their event.

That’s where Crater comes in.

As the company’s Chief Data Officer, Marco White, Master of Computer Science ’18, said, local news outlets ”often fail to capture engagement from a younger audience.” In 2017, 67% of Americans reported that they accessed at least some of their news on social media, and those 18-to-24 years old spent an average of 176 minutes per week consuming online videos.

Crater’s founders aim to spur local engagement by pairing intuitive storytelling templates with easy-to-use video editing tools and making them available to people interested in telling stories about their communities.

The Crater team is composed of White, Vu Francois, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ‘18, Kirollos Morkos, Master of Computer Science ’18, and Arpit Sheth, Master of Computer Science ’18.

Before Crater, Sheth, the company’s CEO, had been doing freelance design work for local businesses and community organizations. Pondering the current media landscape and the way most people access information, he realized the extent to which “you’re stuck in an echo chamber, you’re stuck in your own bubble.” His work with community organizations led him to think, “You know, there is a way that we can use creativity for social good”—a thought that eventually gave rise to Crater.

Diagram showing lack of local news content

Interconnected & Interactive

One of team Crater’s biggest advantages is its interdisciplinary nature. “We’re engineers, but we’re designers; we’re designers, but we know business,” said Sheth. “We all converged on the idea that local news is one way that we can empower people to tell the stories that are happening around them so that we can improve community engagement, we can improve social trust and the social fabric.”

The Crater team hopes to form partnerships and work in conjunction with existing local news outlets. Their goal is to offer tools, platforms, and services to support local news creators and get people excited about what’s happening in their communities.

“Last semester, I actually took a class called Tech, Media & Democracy,” said Morkos, who will serve as Crater’s Chief Technology Officer. Once a week, the students interacted with high-profile media professionals who serve as guest speakers. Morkos said he has benefitted from “hearing the main points of [those] in local media” and learning how Crater could best serve reporters.

That’s the kind of interaction Sheth values the most. He is especially grateful to his professors for, “throwing us out in the wild” and encouraging students to create projects that function well in the real world.

“There’s been this very great sense of always being immersed in reality even though we’re still in school,” he said. “That’s what makes us feel confident when we’re looking to spin this company out full-time. We’ve never felt like we’ve been stuck building Crater in an academic bubble.”

Trust Others and Yourself

Throughout the process of Startup Studio, the Crater team has learned a few lessons about starting a company. “The most important thing is to be open,” said White. “Talk to as many people as you can. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas. It’s never helpful to keep an idea secret.” Cultivating connections across disciplines, he said, “helps grow you as an entrepreneur.”

“I’m a computer science student, so it’s tempting to just talk to other computer science students,” Morkos said, “but I found that once Vu and I started working together, I started talking to other MBAs. I really learned so much from them just working in an interdisciplinary setting that I wouldn’t have if I’d just stuck to my comfort zone.”

Being at a school like Cornell Tech that unites aspiring entrepreneurs across various disciplines to inspire and support strategic risk-taking has helped Francois, Crater’s Chief Product Officer and the team’s only MBA candidate, become “more willing and open to pursuing those dreams.”

The biggest lesson for Sheth has been trusting his own talent. “Don’t let perceived inexperience hold you back from pursuing an entrepreneurial journey,” he said. Because he had just finished college and lacked full-time work experience when he arrived at Cornell Tech, interacting with older MBAs and engineering students could, “feel overwhelming” at first. Eventually he came to realize that the relationships he was building and the practical, hands-on education he was getting counted as valuable, real-world experience.

What’s Next?

White said the company’s long-term plan involves making locally sourced content, “easily discoverable to anyone living in the community.” Sheth summed it up and said, “We’re really passionate about this idea, so we’re going to continue pursuing it full-time.”


Cornell Tech and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute welcome Daniel Lee, Ph.D. and Volodymyr Kuleshov, Ph.D.

NEW YORK – Cornell Tech announced that Daniel Lee, Ph.D. and Volodymyr Kuleshov, Ph.D. will be joining the exceptional faculty at the Roosevelt Island campus. With research and industry experience in autonomous systems, machine learning, and computational genomics, the new professors will further expand Cornell Tech’s research expertise and interdisciplinary work in artificial intelligence. Founded in 2012, Cornell Tech opened its campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City in Fall 2017.

“Professor Lee is a world leader in robotics and autonomous systems. Professor Kuleshov is an expert in machine learning applied to genomics and personalized medicine. They will be valuable additions to our already outstanding group of AI faculty and researchers at Cornell Tech,” said Dan Huttenlocher, Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech. “We are excited for them to share their expertise as part of the Cornell Tech community, working not only with students and researchers but also with companies, startups and nonprofits on challenges facing society today.”

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Daniel Lee, Ph.D., Professor comes to Cornell Tech after 17 years at the University of Pennsylvania where he was the UPS Foundation Chair Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. At Cornell, he will teach in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. His research focuses on understanding computational principles in biological systems, and applying that knowledge to build autonomous robotic systems. Before UPenn, Lee was a researcher at AT&T and Lucent Bell Laboratories in the Theoretical Physics and Biological Computation departments. He was also a fellow of the Hebrew University Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, an affiliate of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and organized the US-Japan National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering symposium. He is also serving part-time as an Executive Vice President at Samsung Research.

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Volodymyr Kuleshov, Ph.D., Assistant Professor comes to the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech after receiving his Ph.D. at Stanford University, studying artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational genomics. Before Stanford University, Kuleshov earned his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science at McGill University. Additionally, Kuleshov has worked at Illumina Inc., Moleculo Inc. and Bell Laboratories researching genome sequencing and algorithmic game theory.

Cornell Tech’s research focuses include interdisciplinary teams of faculty in the areas of Security & Privacy, Artificial Intelligence, Data & Modeling, Human-Computer Interaction & Social Computing, and Business Law & Policy, with a focus on applied research and real-world impact.

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.

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.







Although worldwide literacy rates are on the rise, there were still 750 million illiterate adults around the globe in 2017, according to UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

Many of these people now have access to smartphones but, without being able to read or write, it is challenging for them to use the technology to its full potential.

In response, Cornell Tech students created litOS, a mobile operating system designed to enable low-literacy readers to use their smartphones to communicate and use the Internet, without having to read or write.  

Before coming to Cornell Tech, Raoul Nanavati, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’18, started a mobile game company for the Indian market. “That’s when I was exposed to the needs and capabilities of smartphone users in India,” he says. People would constantly ask his team about the phone’s capabilities, how to perform basic tasks, and how to use new applications. He realized that there should be a way to teach people how to use their phones by making an easy-to-use operating system.

When he got to Cornell Tech he teamed up with his brother Jai Nanavati, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’18, Max Shatkhin, Master in Computer Science ’18, Sindhu Babu, Technion-Cornell Dual Master’s Degrees in Connective Media ’18, and Eyvind Niklasson, Master in Computer Science ’18, to build a solution tailor-made for the low-literacy population.

The litOS Technology

To better understand the needs and challenges of their potential consumers, the team conducted user interviews with 20 people of low literacy levels in India. “We got to speak to them through video conference and ask probing questions into what phones and applications they use, how they bought their phone, and how they set it up and continue to use it,” says Raoul Nanavati, “These qualitative interviews informed our features and applications in the system.”

In response to this research, they created a text-free user interface with illustrative icons, internet-accessible apps, a contextual voice assistant that shows the user the most relevant action on that screen, and the ability for someone to remotely access the system to help? The team “developed litOS using agile methodologies and worked in weekly sprints using our user feedback to constantly tweak and improve the user interface as we developed,” says Raoul Nanavati. “Our focus is on how to make it a contextual and helpful system instead of a query-based system which assumes the user understands the basic concepts of the internet and content,” he adds.

“[We wanted to] address the fact that complete independence won’t be reached right away,” says Jai Nanavati. “The remote companion application that lets friends and family remote into the phone and help with specific tasks came directly from the fact that we were fielding requests.” They made additional changes to the prototype based on additional user research. Because they couldn’t go to India during the semester, they visited senior citizen homes and immigrant organizations in New York to test their prototype with people with low literacy or low tech literacy. They also sent their prototype to colleagues and friends in India, Bangladesh, and Ivory Coast to conduct research tests and asked them to film their interactions.

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From Classroom to Company

After winning one of four Startup Awards, Jai and Raoul Nanavati are moving to India to set up operations, travel to rural areas to conduct more user research, and test it with users to incorporate their feedback. Max Shatkhin will continue working for the company part-time in New York City.

“Understanding how to create a narrative around our product was the single most valuable takeaway from Startup Studio,” says Raoul Nanavati, “It was particularly important for us because our problem is not something people are exposed to in America. Understanding how to communicate the problem to other people helped us understand the problem at a much deeper level than we perhaps would have if we built this in India.” They also credit their confidence to the constant feedback they received from people in the industry like venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

“Through this user research, our aim is to have a product that works flawlessly with any demographic across India,” says Jai Nanavati. At that point, they will look for more investment and work with smartphone manufacturers with the goal of having their first customers by the end of 2019.

While they are starting this journey in India, they are very clear that their goal is to provide the next billion users a way to have the same access to information and communication that everyone  reading this can experience today. The team has been moving fast and recently announced Indrani Medhi, a researcher at Microsoft Research, and leader in the research of text-free user interfaces for low literacy users, will join their advisory board.

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The litOS team from left to right: Raoul Nanavati, Max Shatkhin, Jai Nanavati, Eyvind Niklasson, Sindhu Babu

Caring for sick or elderly family members can be a stressful and emotional experience. A team of graduate students in Startup Studio applied their skills as technologists to help support caregivers during this challenging time.

ReverCare, a web platform, connects family caregivers to care coaches who help them craft a personalized long-term care plan. Kiyan Rajabi and Utsav Vakil, both Technion-Cornell Dual Master’s Degrees in Health Tech ’18, and Darya Moldavskaya, Master in Computer Science ’18, were motivated to develop ReverCare after seeing their own families struggle with the challenges of caregiving.

When Rajabi’s 88-year-old grandmother had a stroke, his whole family was affected — but it was his mother who took the hardest hit. “My mom emerged as this really selfless caregiver,” he explains. While discussing ideas for their Startup Studio project, it soon became clear that Moldavskaya and Vakil shared Rajabi’s experiences and concerns.

“We all have elderly grandparents and we saw how much time our parents spent; all the stress that they had to go through; all the confusion,” says Rajabi. Caregivers have so many questions, adds Moldavskaya: “How do I get my mother fed? How do I make sure she finds the right doctor? How do I make sure that I know how to pay the bill when it comes?”

Building a Solution in Response to Caregivers Real-life Needs

According to the National Alliance for Caregiving, there are nearly 44 million family caregivers in the U.S. — almost 20 percent of the adult population. To ensure that their solution matched users’ needs, the team carried out extensive research and talked to dozens of caregivers.

“We asked them, ‘What are your problems? Can you tell us what you find most challenging?’ Many struggled with the fact that all the resources are all over the place and feeling emotionally isolated,” says Moldavskaya.

The team found that while there is no shortage of products and services to support caregivers, but people often don’t know how to access them. With ReverCare, care coaches draw on their professional resources and provide practical solutions to problems, which can range from day-to-day logistics likes coordinating the collection or delivery of prescriptions, to helping with stressful situations like unexpected or high medical bills.

“The care coach is familiar with your insurance plan and understands what should be covered, what shouldn’t be covered. They can figure it out and see if there’s been a mistake,” explains Moldavskaya.

Not only does ReverCare allow caregivers to communicate directly with care coaches, it also centralizes information, “We also have a very robust database of resources, so we essentially match people up to things that they’re eligible for. We do all the vetting of the companies. We identify the costs for them,” says Rajabi.

Responding to their target users’ concerns, the team ensured that access to emotional support is a key component of the platform. ReverCare connects each caregiver to a single care coach who can offer empathy and provide a seamless experience, “You see one person, so you don’t have to re-explain your situation. You don’t have to say, ‘I’m caring for my mom, she’s 89 and she has Alzheimer’s’. They already know that’,” explains Moldavskaya.

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From Startup Studio to Company Launch

The entrepreneurial spirit at Cornell Tech allowed them to refine and expand their technical skills while developing business expertise, such as learning how to start a company, and how to fund and sell a product.

“We feel very prepared for creating this company because of all the experiences we’ve had; we’ve presented at least dozens of times,” says Rajabi.

ReverCare is launching its initial private beta in New York City, but aims to roll the platform out across the US, and perhaps beyond. Their ambition and sense of purpose are palpable; perhaps this is because the team is so clearly motivated by personal experience. “We see the effect that caregiving had on our parents,” says Rajabi, “It’s our mission to ensure that others don’t have to go through as harrowing an experience. We want it to be a joyful experience for everyone, so we can maximize the loving time that they spend with their families.”