Visit

Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund and Siegel Family Endowment Grants Will Allow Teacher In Residence Expansion into Four Additional Schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx, Preparing Students and Teachers for the Digital Age

NEW YORK — Cornell Tech, Siegel Family Endowment and the Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund today announced two major grants to expand the successful Teacher In Residence (TIR) program. Cornell Tech’s Teacher in Residence program is one of the most innovative and sustainable models for incorporating computer science and tech education into regular school days. First launched at PS/IS 217 on Roosevelt Island, and later at Hunters Point Community Middle School in Long Island City and Girls Prep Lower East Middle School, the new grant funding will enable the TIR program expansion into four additional schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx to help build computational literacy and coding experience and implementation to diverse populations of students, many in high-need areas throughout New York City.

“At Cornell Tech, we believe computer science is teachable to every student and that it imperative that we prepare all children for the digital age,” says Diane Levitt, Senior Director of K-12 Education at Cornell Tech. “On Roosevelt Island, we have seen how the Teacher in Residence has transformed the school, bringing computer science to every single classroom in every grade. Thanks to the vision and generosity of our donors, we will be able to expand our understanding of how to best support teachers as they implement computer science not as a special elective or after school activity, but into the regular school day, for every students, throughout all grade levels.”

“We’re thrilled to be a part of expanding the Cornell Tech Teacher in Residence program,” said Thea Charles, Head of Knowledge and Impact at Siegel Family Endowment. “SFE has been a partner in this project from the very beginning, and we’re excited to see this proven, research-backed program continue to expand in schools across New York City.”

“The Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund strives for a world where every child can think, solve and create using every effective tool possible – including technology,” said Amber Oliver, Director of the Fund. “We are investing in the Teacher in Residence model because Cornell Tech understands the only way we will achieve this vision, for every child, is if every teacher has the support and resources to infuse computing education into their classrooms, no matter what they teach.”

The Teacher in Residence program is part of Cornell Tech’s commitment to New York City’s Computer Science for All (CS4All) initiative. Cornell Tech’s Teachers in Residence are experienced computer science master teachers who provide professional development, curate curricula, help teachers plan lessons, model instruction, observe classes and give teachers feedback, building the capacity of non-computer science teachers to teach computing in New York City public elementary and middle schools. The program seeks to test and scale tools and curricula teachers can implement with modest investment to add academic value. Thanks to the grant funding from the Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund and Siegel Family Endowment, the program will scale to The Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem, Creo College Prep a new middle school opening in the Bronx, P.S. 86, and at least one additional school in Brooklyn.

K-12 tech education is a priority for the Cornell Tech campus, and over 100 graduate students volunteer their time and knowledge at campus K-12 events. Cornell Tech’s K-12 engagement will grow to over 4,500 elementary and middle school students with the new funding. Cornell Tech faculty also participate in contributing ideas and expertise to Cornell Tech’s curriculum, development, and curation. To date, over 350 teachers have been engaged in computer science training.

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.




Good Code is a weekly podcast about ethics in our digital world. We look at ways in which our increasingly digital societies could go terribly wrong, and speak with those trying to prevent that. Each week, our host Chine Labbé engages with a different expert on the ethical dilemmas raised by our ever-more pervasive digital technologies. Good Code is a dynamic collaboration between the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech and journalist Chine Labbé.

Follow @goodcodepodcast on Twitter,  Facebook, and Instagram.

On this episode:

Stark is fascinated by the ways in which computers quantify and reshape our emotions. This fascination of his started when he realized, as a teenager, how necessary it was for him to use emoticons in order to get his point across in the digital sphere.

We ask him about emojis, animojis and all the stickers and reaction icons that exist online.

We get his view on the Disney-Pixar movie “Inside Out,” and we talk about facial recognition, a set of technologies that constitute, in his view, “the plutonium of AI.”

You can listen to this episode on iTunesSpotifySoundCloudStitcherGoogle PlayTuneInYouTube, and on all of your favorite podcast platforms.

We talked about:

  • In a 2014 article entitled “The conservatism of emoji,” Luke Stark and his co-author Kate Crawford write that “emojis are the social lubricant smoothing the rough edges of our digital lives.” “They underscore tone, introduce humor, and give us a quick way to bring personality into otherwise monochrome spaces,” they write.
  • In this episode, we talk about the History of emojis. Read about it in Wired.
  • Stark mentions some research he has done on Mood Panda, a mood-tracking app based out of the UK, and through which people can anonymously share their feelings and get support.
  • In May 2017, a leaked report from executives at Facebook Australia detailed how the social network could monitor moments in which young Australians felt down or depressed.
  • In a September 2015 article published in the LA Review of Books, Luke Stark and his co-author Anna Lauren Hoffmann explained why they thought the Disney-Pixar movie “Inside Out” represented “a potentially dangerous line of thinking.”
  • In this episode, Stark also mentions a study that showed a correlation between Instagram post colors and mental health. Read about it here.
  • Stark is very critical of facial recognition. He calls it the “plutonium of AI,” and thinks its use should be restricted to a very small number of applications. His boss, Microsoft president Brad Smith, has called for government regulation, but he is more optimistic about what facial recognition has to offer.

Read more:

  • According to this NBC news investigation, companies may have scraped your photo online without your consent in order to conduct research on facial recognition. In the article, you can check whether your Flickr photos were secretly entered into an IBM dataset.
  • At a recent conference, Luke Stark referred to this May 2017 article in Medium. It’s about facial recognition, and it’s called “Physiognomy’s new clothes.” The paper details a problematic Chinese study of criminals, and cautions against feedback loops.
  • Read about the emotion detection industry, and one of its companies, Affectiva, which claims to have “the largest emotion data repository in the world.”
  • And finally, a little bit on emoji diversity, and whether or not we should get rid of white emojis.

Good Code is a weekly podcast about ethics in our digital world. We look at ways in which our increasingly digital societies could go terribly wrong, and speak with those trying to prevent that. Each week, our host Chine Labbé engages with a different expert on the ethical dilemmas raised by our ever-more pervasive digital technologies. Good Code is a dynamic collaboration between the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech and journalist Chine Labbé.

Follow @goodcodepodcast on Twitter,  Facebook, and Instagram.

On this episode:

Nissenbaum thinks the current model of consent-based privacy has failed us, leading to the privacy fatigue we are experiencing today.

She is calling for a post-consent approach to privacy, based on what she calls “contextual integrity”.

We ask her what she means by that, why she believes privacy is not dead, and how she avoids online surveillance, just like spiders avoid predators in the wild.

You can listen to this episode on iTunesSpotifySoundCloudStitcherGoogle PlayTuneInYouTube, and on all of your favorite podcast platforms.

We talked about:

  • We bring you on a tour of SPYSCAPE, New York’s new spy museum, which opened in midtown Manhattan in February 2018. If you haven’t been there, we highly recommend it. This interactive museum is both informational, and a lot of fun ! You will be profiled and discover what kind of spy you could be (apparently, I’d make a good agent handler!), and you will have the opportunity to channel your inner 15 year-old as you cross the “special ops laser tunnel” or as you practice detecting lies in an interrogation booth !
  • We talk about data obfuscation as a radical way to escape online surveillance. Turns out, obfuscation also exists in the wild. Scientists recently discovered spiders in the Amazon and in the Philippines that build decoys of themselves on their webs to deceive their predators. Read about it here and here.
  • Helen Nissenbaum presents TrackMeNot, a browser extension she created with technologist Daniel Howe. It generates fake queries in the background while you are searching for the information you really want. That way, it buries your searches and interests in so much noise that it is impossible – or at least very costly – to know what your REAL interests are. French technologist Vincent Toubiana is now maintaining it.
  • Nissenbaum then created AdNauseam, a plugin that clicks on every single ad on the web pages you visit. The goal here is to prevent your online profiling by ad agencies. AdNauseam was banned from the Chrome Store in 2017. Nissenbaum says that’s a sign that it had an impact.
  • In this episode, Nissenbaum also mentions a fascinating case opposing the Weather Channel and the city of Los Angeles. The city’s attorney is suing the Weather Channel for profiting from data collected in an allegedly deceitful way. 
  • We briefly mention the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in May 2018. Here is a great article explaining what it means for businesses and people in Europe. And if you want more, there is a link to the full regulation at the bottom of the article. 
  • California also signed a new law to protect online privacy in June 2018. It will go into effect in January 2020. Read about it here.
  • Nissenbaum is not a big fan of the consent model. In 2017, a study confirmed her fears: no one reads terms of services.

Read more:

  • If you want to read more about contextual integrity, check out Helen Nissenbaum’s book “Privacy in Context, Technology, Policy and the Integrity of Social Life”.
  • To learn more about obfuscation as a way to protest online surveillance, read Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum’s book “Obfuscation, a User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest”.
  • In The Atlantic last August, Ian Bogost argued that we had long lost the “personal-data privacy war”. In his piece called “Welcome to the age of privacy nihilism”, he wrote: “The opponent in the data-privacy invasion is not a comic-book enemy of fixed form, one that can be cornered, compromised, and defeated. Instead it’s a hazy murk, a chilling, Lovecraftian murmur that can’t be seen, let alone touched, let alone vanquished”. 
  • Our guest in Episode 1 was tech journalist Julia Angwin. If you haven’t listened to our conversation, you should! In her book “Dragnet Nation”, she explains how she tried to evade online surveillance. She quit Google search and started using DuckDuckGo, left Gmail and started using Riseup, used a burner phone for work calls. But mostly, she realized how complicated it was to evade the dragnets!
  • During six weeks, Gizmodo journalist Kahsmir Hill blocked tech giants from her life. She says it was “hell”.
  • In his open letter for the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web, web inventor Tim Berners-Lee warns: “If we continue to click consent without demanding our data rights be respected, we walk away from our responsibility to put these issues on the priority agenda of our governments”.
  • Can people really expect privacy in public places? Read about this “creepy” assignment given to law students, and how they easily managed to de-anonymize people in the street, just by listening in on what they said loudly enough to be heard, and picking up on visible details from their clothes and accessories. 
  • Finally, if you missed it, you should definitely read this New York Times’ investigation from December 2018 on why anonymous location data is not so anonymous after all.

Three members of the Cornell Tech faculty were selected as recipients of the 2018 Google Faculty Research Awards. Professors Yoav Artzi, Daniel Lee, and Vitaly Shmatikov were selected to receive unrestricted gifts to support their research.

According to an announcement made by Google, “grants cover tuition for a graduate student and provide both faculty and students the opportunity to work directly with Google researchers and engineers.”

Yoav Artzi is an Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech and in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. Professor Artzi’s Language in Context group studies representations and learning algorithms for language understanding in context.

Daniel Dongyuel Lee is a Professor at Cornell Tech and in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Cornell University. His group focuses on understanding general computational principles in biological systems and on applying that knowledge to build autonomous systems.

Vitaly Shmatikov is a Professor at Cornell Tech and in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. His research areas are security and privacy.

Full list of recipients

 

 


Good Code is a weekly podcast about ethics in our digital world. We look at ways in which our increasingly digital societies could go terribly wrong, and speak with those trying to prevent that. Each week, our host Chine Labbé engages with a different expert on the ethical dilemmas raised by our ever-more pervasive digital technologies. Good Code is a dynamic collaboration between the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech and journalist Chine Labbé.

Follow @goodcodepodcast on Twitter,  Facebook, and Instagram.

On this episode:

Julia Angwin spent years covering technology at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica. Now, she is embarking on a new adventure: a soon-to-be-launched newsroom called The Markup.

Its goal? Investigating technology, and the way it impacts society. Its secret weapon? Data-driven journalism, produced by a staff that is made up of half journalists and half technologists.

We ask her about the need for such a newsroom, we discuss some of her past work, and we talk about her hopes and fears for the future. Our conversation was condensed and edited for clarity.

You can listen to this episode on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn, YouTube, and on all of your favorite podcast platforms.

We talked about:

  • We discuss a ProPublica piece called Machine Bias. It’s about a software used in certain US jurisdictions to predict a defendant’s likelihood of committing crimes in the future. And we talk about the debate it sparked on the meaning of “fairness”.
  • We mention the internal protest that arose in 2018 at Google over an AI contract with the Pentagon. A petition was signed, some employees resigned and Google eventually said that it would not renew the controversial contract.
  • Should the codes for algorithms be open, in order to avoid biases? Sure, why not. But an open code might not be enough, Angwin warns. Sometimes,the bias lies in the training data, as the infamous 2015 Google Photos incident showed, she says. It was tagging black faces as “gorillas”.
  • In September 2018, Fortune warned of the “legal perils” The Markup could face because of its reporting tactics. Read about the lawsuit filed by the ACLU to try and obtain an exception to the law for academics and journalists.
  • When she was at ProPublica, Julia Angwin revealed that Facebook was allowing discriminatory ads on its platforms. Then, the company thanked her on Twitter for doing so.

Read more:

  • To learn more about The Markup, you can join their mailing list here.
  • You can also read this New York Times article from September 2018.
  • To learn more about Julia Angwin, check out her website or follow her on Twitter.
  • Good Code also recommends her book Dragnet Nation, a fascinating read on her attempt to evade online surveillance.

Tatch, a startup digital health company incubated as a part of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute’s Runway Startup program at Cornell Tech, has announced a pilot partnership with the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, part of the Northwell Health system, and the Valley Hospital to validate Tatch’s sleep diagnostic patch technology.

The company uses its proprietary technology to capture eight precise measurements including respiratory effort, flow, oxygen levels, heart rate, and other indications for sleep apnea diagnosis. Tatch has initiated a process with the FDA with the ultimate ambition to diagnose and aid in treatment of sleep disorders at home.

In the pilots with the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research and the Valley Hospital, the patches will be tested and compared simultaneously with Polysomnography (PSG) data recorded at the sleep lab facility. In one of the pilots measurements will be taken alongside Fitbit and Apple Watch as well.

“It is an important step in our partnership with the distinguished clinicians at the Northwell Health network and the Valley Hospital, and a major milestone towards our goal of using technology to diagnose sleep disorders at home” says the CEO, Dr. Amir Reuveny.

Dr. Stephanie Zandieh, a medical advisor for Tatch and the principal investigator for the Valley pilot, said “It has been an amazing experience working with Tatch for the last 2 years, watching the process from conception to product. This week marks an important milestone for Tatch, starting clinical trials. Tatch will revolutionize sleep medicine by bringing quality measurable sleep testing to your home.”

Dr. Michael Kirschenbaum, the lead investigator on this study at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research added, “We are extremely excited to be collaborating with Tatch and the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Developing innovative tech-based solutions to address gaps in medical and mental health treatment is central to our mission to provide exceptional care and services that reflect the cutting edge in med-tech.”

Dr. Fernando Gómez-Baquero the Director of Runway and Spinouts at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute said, “This collaboration between Tatch and these major hospitals is a perfect example of the power of using digital technologies to address some of the most important health challenges of our time. We are proud that one of our most promising startups is focusing on the relevant topic of sleep, and more so that it’s working diligently to find the most relevant collaborators so that they can develop real products and services that have the potential of helping millions of patients in the US and all over the world. There are the types of companies and challenges we are looking to support.”

About Tatch

Tatch is a digital health technology company on a mission to make sleep medicine more accessible. Founded by a team of PhD’s and sleep experts, Tatch is part of the Runway Startup program at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute. Based in New York City, with offices in Tel Aviv, Israel, Tatch was founded in 2017. For more information, visit www.tatch.com.

About the Runway Startup Program

The Runway Startup Postdoc Program is part business school, part research institution, part startup incubator. Based at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Runway ushers recent PhDs in digital technology fields through a paradigm shift—from an academic mindset to an entrepreneurial outlook. Postdocs come to the Institute with ideas for unproven products and markets and receive significant support as well as mentorship from academic and business experts in connective media, health technology, security & privacy and computer vision, among a number of other fields.


Technology can be a powerful force for social and civic good. Every fall, Cornell Tech’s Product Studio gives teams of students the chance to build solutions for challenges posed by leading NYC startups, companies, and organizations, and many choose to use their skills for the benefit of society. In the latest round of challenges, teams of students tackled issues as varied as climate change and cyberhate.

VaynerMedia asked: How might we develop a system that monitors changes in global shoreline and/or other ongoing effects of global warming?

Through brainstorming and feedback sessions, Team Rising Tide decided to focus on how they could engage the public in efforts to reduce carbon emissions. As team member Campbell Weaver said, “How could we encourage people to think about the environment when they’re making everyday decisions in their life?”

The team’s solution, Footprint, is a browser extension that tracks users’ online grocery orders then calculates their carbon footprint. The extension scrapes data from a website’s server, processes it using algorithms, then sends it to online calculators which work out how much carbon dioxide is emitted during an item’s production, packaging, and shipping. The results are displayed as green (low), yellow (medium), or red (high) plant-shaped labels; the design idea was inspired by organic labeling schemes.

Footprint is designed to have a wide reach, said Weaver, “20 percent of your individual footprint comes from your dietary choices and online shopping is growing; it’s an industry that’s going to touch 90 percent of households in a couple of years.”

Team members included Ryan Farr, Master in Computer Science ’19, Campbell Weaver, Master in Computer Science ’19, Wen Guo, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’19, and Maximilian Kuester, Master in Operations Research and Information Engineering ’19.

Team VaynerMedia

Output asked: How might we use technology to empower people to be musically creative without formal music training?

Team Remuse shares a love of listening to and making music, and believes that musical creativity has a positive impact on society since it can empower people and improve wellbeing; they jumped at Output’s challenge.

The team’s music modification app, Remuse, is inspired by Instagram and Snapchat filters. “Users can input popular songs they find on their iTunes or that they download. Then they can apply simple filters to make it sound higher-pitched, or make the voice sound funky, or add nice backing,” said team member Dhruv Jain. The app scans MP3 files and renders them editable. Via a sliding window, users can select and alter parts of the waveform.They can also change the pitch and frequency or add noise and distortion.  

Music is a powerful force for social good, said the team, since it can provide emotional support during difficult times and can connect people. By making musical creativity more accessible, Remuse aims to help people express themselves. “If we can get more people to make more music, I think the world will be better for it,” said Jain.

Team members included Kelly Sun, Technion-Cornell Dual Master’s Degrees in Connective Media ’19, Benjamin Hwang, Master in Operations Research and Information Engineering ’19, Dhruv Jain, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’19, and Mike Chen, Master in Computer Science ’19

Team Output

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) asked: How might we create tools or services to support likely and actual targets of cyberhate and cyberharassment?

ADL’s challenge struck a chord with the members of Team Triggr, all of whom have been affected, either directly or indirectly, by cyberharassment. Through interviews with victims, the team found that reporting incidents of cyberhate can be traumatic. “On a social platform like Twitter, if you want to report toxic messages, you have to complete a survey for every negative message you receive,” said Yixue Wang. Not only is this time-consuming, but it also forces victims to revisit the harmful material.

The team’s solution is Triggr, an app that scrapes a user’s social media for negative messages and aggregates them, allowing victims to report in bulk. Triggr also contains links to mental health and legal resources.

Team members included Mark O’Looney, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’19, Meera Nanda, Technion-Cornell Dual Master’s Degrees in Connective Media ’19, Michael Barron, Master in Computer Science ’19, and Yixue Wang, Technion-Cornell Dual Master’s Degrees in Connective Media ’19.

All three teams agreed that working with peers and faculty in Cornell Tech’s open, collaborative environment was key to the success of their projects. “It is so multidisciplinary,” said Team Rising Tide’s Ryan Farr. “For civic and social tech, we have some really great professors in the faculty. It’s something that I really haven’t seen at any other university.”

Team Anti-Defamation League

For the last 8 years, Professor Eran Segal and his lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science have been studying the gut microbiome and the role it plays in health and disease. On February 7th, Segal spoke on his past and ongoing research as the invited speaker for the inaugural Burnell Symposium at Cornell Tech.

A Stanford-trained computational biologist, Segal focuses on the relationship between nutrition and the microbiome. Despite the enormous impact of food on health, there is a lack of consensus around what constitutes healthy nutrition. Inspired by this, Segal’s lab initiated the “Personalized Nutrition Project” to systematically study heterogeneities in blood glucose response across individuals. The project recruited 1,000 participants and collected over 50,000 blood glucose responses to a variety of meals, tracked against participants’ meal frequencies and medical and gut bacteria profiles. Ultimately, the study found that no single recommended diet is optimal for everyone: When the same person ate the same meal, the results were highly reproducible, but when different people ate the same meal, the results were highly variable.

To explain this variability, Segal used machine learning to predict individual blood glucose responses from clinical and microbiome data and generated personalized diets aimed at moderating blood glucose levels. They recruited 200 participants, half of which were given the standard of care diet recommended by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and half given personalized diets generated by the algorithm. After six months of intervention and six months of follow up, interim analysis showed the algorithm-generated diets were able to significantly reduce (by 60%) blood glucose when compared to participants’ habitual diets. The startup, Day Two, has integrated these algorithmic diets into a consumer application.

Segal’s lab also studies the gut microbiome’s circadian rhythmicity, the effectiveness of probiotic supplements in colonizing the microbiome, and the role of artificial sweeteners in susceptibility to metabolic disease. Their studies have found that the gut microbiome is primarily determined by the environment, particularly food intake, and is associated with trait variability in metabolic factors such as HDL cholesterol and body mass index. More details regarding Segal and his lab’s research can be found here.

With his research, Segal is uncovering the intricate connections between the gut microbiome and human health. Through his talk, Segal illuminated how future computational models of the gut microbiome could lead to better health outcomes and forge a path towards a more personalized approach to medicine.

The Burnell Symposium is hosted by Roger and Joelle Burnell, who have endowed the Roger and Joelle Burnell Chair in Integrated Health and Technology at Cornell Tech.