Cornell Tech’s K-12 Education Initiative works with NYC Public Schools to bring computer science to all.
Categories
Part business school. Part research institution. Part startup incubator. The Runway Startup Postdoc Program at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute helps recently graduated PhDs transition from academics to entrepreneurs.
Eric Conti, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’16, shares how Cornell Tech gave him the skills to effectively use an entrepreneurial mindset within a large organization.
Categories
Jillian Sue, Jacobs Technion-Cornell Dual MS Degrees – Health Tech Concentration ’18, speaks about how her degree has helped her to become the Product Manager of Paige.AI.
Categories
Human Rights Attorney Joins Clinic as First Director to Expand Outreach and Activism
Cornell Tech announced today its Computer Security Clinic for Victims of Intimate Partner Violence, a crucial step in sustaining and expanding the clinic’s groundbreaking work with vulnerable people. An interdisciplinary research team at Cornell Tech, with collaborators from Cornell University in Ithaca and New York University, created the clinic to help survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) determine whether their abusers are using technology as a tool to harm them.
The clinic’s founding director will be human rights attorney and surveillance and digital rights expert Sarah St.Vincent, who will turn the clinic’s research into action. As Director, St.Vincent will oversee the growth of the clinic, tackle the fundamental causes of tech-enabled abuse, and promote broader reforms city-wide and beyond.
“The Computer Security Clinic for Victims of Intimate Partner Violence will allow our talented research team to help more survivors in collaboration with the New York City Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender Based Violence and other partners,” said Deborah Estrin, Associate Dean for Impact at Cornell Tech. “By studying and creating software tools for victims, the IPV clinic can help reduce widespread abuse enabled by smartphones. This kind of research, centered around public interest tech and impact, is core to Cornell Tech’s mission in New York City.”
“We’re proud to build on our award-winning research on how to combat technology-enabled abuse, which can be so daunting for survivors,” said Nicola Dell, Assistant Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, and co-lead of the research team. “Too often, technology places power in the hands of the perpetrator rather than the victim — and St. Vincent’s new role will help elevate our research.”
The misuse of smartphone technology, social media websites, and other aspects of digital life by abusive spouses and partners has become an increasingly urgent problem in the United States. Since 2016, a group of researchers at Cornell Tech have been documenting how abusers can misuse technology to track and harass others. In tandem, the group has been running the Computer Security Clinic, which works directly with IPV survivors in partnership with the New York City Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender Based Violence.
The research team has previously investigated and catalogued smartphone apps — often described as “spyware” or “stalkerware” — that can enable stalking and abusive monitoring. It has also created a special software tool to detect such apps and helped prompt tech companies to update antivirus programs to flag them. Most recently, it has published a peer-reviewed study of an approach to providing hands-on tech help to survivors.
“Privacy is power, and I’m delighted to have joined a team of technology experts that’s dedicated to empowering abuse survivors,” said Sarah St.Vincent, Director of the Computer Security Clinic. “Everyone has the right to safety both online and offline, and we will be strengthening that right every day.”
St.Vincent joins Cornell Tech from Human Rights Watch, the global human rights organization, where she conducted research and advocacy on US government surveillance and other privacy issues. St.Vincent has also addressed surveillance and privacy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, and has worked with survivors of IPV and human trafficking at a rights organization in the United Kingdom. She holds a law degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree from Harvard University. St.Vincent began her work as Director of the IPV Computer Security Clinic at Cornell Tech on October 1, 2019.
For more information, please visit https://www.ipvtechresearch.org/.
About Cornell Tech
Cornell Tech’s degree programs and research initiatives provide responsive approaches to the rapid emergence of technologies and their societal impact in the digital age. The Jacobs Institute, established jointly by Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, embodies the Cornell Tech mission by fostering radical experimentation at the intersection of research, education, and entrepreneurship.
The new, 700,000-square-foot Cornell Tech campus is located on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan. This highly sustainable and open campus, designed by a team of award-winning architects, will expand to house two million square feet of state-of-the-art buildings, over two acres of open space, and more than 2,000 graduate students and hundreds of faculty and staff.
Deborah Estrin, Robert V. Tishman ’37 professor of Computer Science and associate dean for impact, was recently elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) for her research leveraging mobile devices and patient-generated data. By applying computer architecture and mobile sensing concepts, Estrin’s work is accelerating data-driven driven personal health management. Estrin is also on the forefront of creating a rigorous multi-disciplinary mHealth research community.
Rainu Kaushal, M.D. at Weill Cornell Medicine, was also elected to the Academy. Estrin is also a Professor in Dr Kaushal’s Department of Healthcare Policy and Research at Weill Cornell Medicine.
According to a release by NAM, “election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.”
Read the full announcement here.
Categories
New technology can get the subways back on track.
Collaborations between academia, industry and the public sector are needed to modernize New York state mass transit, according to speakers and panelists at the “New Day at the MTA” conference, Sept. 20 at the Jacob K. Javits Center in Manhattan.
The conference, co-sponsored by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Empire State Development Corporation, explored the myriad solutions officials say are urgently needed by an aging transit system that moves 8.6 million people a day – roughly half the population of New York state.
“I think there is a growing societal disconnect between emerging technology and government projects, and I believe it is hurting this state and this country,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who launched the conference with a call to return to the ingenuity that built the subway in the first place. “The stark reality is that we cannot succeed long term without new technology and new companies entering the field.”
The conference continued Cornell’s collaboration with the MTA earlier this year, which averted a shutdown of the L train so dreaded that New Yorkers dubbed it the “L-pocalypse.” Considering fresh perspectives that incorporate emerging technology was vital both for the L train project and for the sustainability of the entire transit system, speakers said.
To help develop these kinds of solutions, the Jacobs Institute is launching a master’s degree concentration in urban tech in fall 2020. The degree concentration was announced at the event by Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech.
“We want to design technologies to make cities more connected, livable and sustainable,” Morrisett said. “We’re launching this program because we at Cornell Tech are committed to furthering the public good, by helping break down barriers and facilitate partnerships between tech, academia and the public sector.”
Students in the urban tech concentration will earn dual master’s degrees – an M.S. in information systems from Cornell University and an M.S. in applied information science from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. They’ll apply machine learning, data science, human-computer interaction and product design to develop tools for government, real estate and other emerging urban tech sectors.
“Cornell Tech’s continued commitment to education and to preparing the next generation of innovators and transit leaders is inspiring and deeply needed,” said Patrick Foye, chairman and CEO of the MTA.
The concentration is the result of a collaboration between the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Cornell Engineering and the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Insitute.
“With complex systems operating within larger systems, cities naturally demand interdisciplinary study,” said Ron Brachman, director of the Jacobs Institute and professor of computer science, who served as Cornell’s program chair for the MTA forum.
Though advances have been made in recent years, many aspects of the MTA’s operations remain archaic: Some subway cars date to the 1950s, and they rely on 1980s technology for signaling, which prevents collisions and derailments and helps trains arrive on time.
At the event, which was attended by more than 500 people, Cuomo and other transit leaders appealed to representatives from tech companies to partner with the MTA on new products and innovations. Morrisett, Brachman and Lance Collins, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering, were among the moderators of five panels that sought to explore the challenges and opportunities of these partnerships.
“How can we make a seamless connection, a pipeline, that starts with innovation that occurs largely in either research universities or laboratories elsewhere, and move that into product development and ultimately implementation?” Collins said. “We want to use the technology of today, but we also want to create the technology of tomorrow.”
In January, Collins and Thomas O’Rourke, the Thomas R. Briggs Professor in Engineering in civil and environmental engineering, joined a team of experts in helping Cuomo avert the planned 15-month shutdown of the L train. Along with engineering professors at Columbia – including Mary Boyce, dean of the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science – the team developed a solution that allowed the train’s Canarsie Tunnel, which connects Manhattan to Brooklyn, to remain operational during its much-needed repairs.
The successful collaboration can serve as a model for transit innovation, speakers at the conference said.
“By partnering together,” Morrisett said, “the people in this room today – the senior government officials, the academic thought leaders, the groundbreaking business executives, the science and technology experts – can lead us into this new era, showing New York how to do more by thinking creatively.”
