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Collaboration anchored by Citi lease at The Bridge at Cornell Tech

 

New York, New York– Citigroup Inc. (“Citi”) today announced a collaboration with Cornell Tech, the revolutionary graduate institution, to engage with Cornell University students, faculty, researchers, startups and other companies, and create closer ties between academia and industry.

The collaboration will be anchored by Citi’s presence on the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island. Citi has leased 10,900 square feet in The Bridge at Cornell Tech from Forest City New York and is the only bank located in the building located on Roosevelt Island. The Bridge is a first-of-its-kind building for innovation that brings together residents of the Cornell Tech campus, to foster a culture of collaboration and co-creation.

“Co-locating in The Bridge with companies, entrepreneurs and students will create an energized environment that fosters innovation and enables interaction with a wide range of emerging talent,” said Don Callahan, Citi’s Head of Operations and Technology. “As a firm headquartered in New York City, we are excited to be a part of this initiative with Cornell Tech that will develop and strengthen the City’s technology talent and industry.”

Citi will tap into the expertise of Cornell Tech students and faculty to work closely on new capabilities and emerging technologies such as blockchain, machine learning and big data applications, biometric authentication, Internet of Things, and cyber security. The partnership will provide faculty and students the opportunity to work with Citi in exploring real-world solutions for Citi’s clients and customers, through Product Challenges in Cornell Tech’s Product Studio class, where student teams develop innovative new digital solutions working with companies and nonprofits.

Through programs such as the Citi Ventures University Partnerships program, Citi teams will engage with Cornell Tech students in activities such as hackathons and design sprints to create, test and incubate new ideas and prototypes that have the potential to generate organic growth for Citi. In addition, the Citi Foundation will continue to work with Cornell Tech through their mutual support of the Women in Technology and Entrepreneurship in New York (WiTNYC) initiative, a program designed to significantly increase the participation of women in technology fields in the New York market.

Citi will accommodate approximately 70 to 80 employees in this facility. These employees are responsible for advancing the bank’s customer banking experience, partnering with start-ups on innovative technologies and safeguarding clients’ information. The new flexible work environment will drive collaboration between Citi employees, Cornell Tech students and faculty, and other corporate tenants. Citi employees will move into The Bridge during the first quarter of 2018.

“Bringing together industry leaders like Citi and our pioneering students and faculty focusing on key problems and opportunities of the digital age is part of Cornell Tech’s lifeblood,” said Cornell Tech Dean Dan Huttenlocher. “Collaborations like this one will bring The Bridge and the entire campus to life when we open on Roosevelt Island this fall.”

“Dedicated to uncovering emerging technologies and creative results for their clients and customers, Citi is a great fit for the dynamic environment at The Bridge at Cornell Tech,” said MaryAnne Gilmartin, President and CEO of Forest City New York. “All under one roof, Citi will have easy access to Cornell University students and faculty, inspiring deep innovation.”

Citi’s presence in New York City includes multiple office locations, its branch network and nearly 16,000 employees.

CBRE’s Mary Ann Tighe, Evan Haskell, David Caperna, Evan Fiddle, Sacha Zarba and Ross Zimbalist brokered the lease on behalf of Forest City New York.

Feature photo credit: Max Touhey

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About Citi

Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.

Additional information may be found at www.citigroup.com | Twitter: @Citi | YouTube: www.youtube.com/citi | Blog: http://blog.citigroup.com | Facebook: www.facebook.com/citi | LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/citi

About Cornell Tech

Cornell Tech brings together faculty, business leaders, tech entrepreneurs, and students in a catalytic environment to reinvent the way we live in the digital age. Cornell Tech’s temporary campus has been up and running at Google’s Chelsea building since 2013, with a growing world-class faculty, and more than 200 masters and Ph.D. students who collaborate extensively with tech-oriented companies and organizations and pursue their own start-ups. Construction is underway on Cornell Tech’s campus on Roosevelt Island, with a first phase due to open in September 2017. When fully completed, the campus will include 2 million square feet of state-of-the-art buildings, over 2 acres of open space, and will be home to more than 2,000 graduate students and hundreds of faculty and staff.

About Forest City New York

Forest City New York, a wholly owned subsidiary of Forest City Realty Trust, Inc., is the owner and developer of The Bridge at Cornell Tech, and owns and operates over 30 properties in the New York metropolitan area, including The New York Times Building. Forest City Realty Trust, Inc. is an NYSE-listed national real estate company with $8.2 billion in consolidated assets. The Company is principally engaged in the ownership, development, management and acquisition of commercial and residential real estate throughout the United States, and is the developer of such projects as University Park at MIT, the Science + Technology Park at Johns Hopkins, and 5M in San Francisco. For more information, visitwww.forestcity.net.

About Cornell University

Cornell University is a world-class research institution known for the breadth and rigor of its curricula, and an academic culture dedicated to preparing students to be well-educated and well-rounded citizens of the world. Its faculty, staff and students believe in the critical importance of knowledge—both theoretical and applied—as a means of improving the human condition and solving the world’s problems. With campuses in Ithaca, New York, New York City, and Doha, Qatar, Cornell is a private, Ivy League research university and the land-grant institution of New York state.

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By Maya Israel and Meg J. Ray

Our work in computer science (CS) classrooms focuses on studying strategies that support teachers who have students with learning and cognitive disabilities in their classrooms. This work reinforces that “CS for All” can, and should, include ALL learners, and shows that when CS activities are planned using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) all students can learn and find joy in CS education. UDL is an instructional framework that addresses learning barriers through flexible planning that includes multiple ways of (1) engaging learners, (2) representing instructional content, and (3) allowing learners to express their understanding. Students with disabilities are obviously diverse, with different strengths, challenges, and support needs. The table below includes strategies that our work has shown effective for a wide range of learners.

General Strategies
Strategy Explanation Example
Talk with students’ special education teachers about supports and accommodations The IEP has critical information. Unfortunately, it may not include goals/accommodations specific to CS. Special educators can help translate these supports to CS education. If students use text-to-speech software for reading, see whether that software is compatible with the tools and materials used in CS.
Work with your paraeducators Paraeducators can provide significant support to help students participate in CS activities. They have knowledge about student needs and supports, but they may hang back because of limited CS knowledge. Explain and model for them how you want them to assist in the classroom. When possible, give lesson plans ahead of time to the paraeducators so they know the big ideas of the lesson(s). Also, encourage them to provide verbal prompting during instruction. This “hands off” approach creates a physical space for students and will prompt students to implement CS problem-solving strategies.
UDL-based Strategies
Create flexible activities that allow students to engage in multiple ways Students can engage in CS activities differently and still have meaningful experiences. Consider creating a tiered activity wherein everyone does a base project with extension activities for students who complete the base project. In a robotics activity, create a menu of activities at different challenge levels. All students select an activity from the first challenge level, such as navigating a maze with movement commands and a loop. An extension option could be to refactor the pathway through the maze with fewer commands and multiple loops.
Provide students with project planning strategies Students often benefit from using planning documents and graphic organizers that help them plan the steps of their computational projects. Teachers can model the use of these documents in project planning and engage in collaborative “think alouds,” prior to students working on individual computational projects. Planning sheets help students plan out their ideas using pseudocode. For some students, this might include checklists of required components (e.g., use of conditional statements. The teachers can then check these planning documents and discuss steps with students. If students get stuck, they can then go back to these planning documents for support.
Encourage and teach collaboration Teach and practice collaboration strategies. It may be helpful to use conversation protocols and sentence starters to help students collaborate productively. Additionally, strategically seat students with disabilities next to peers without disabilities. Students may use sentence starters when they need help with debugging, such as “I want my sprite/program to…” and “Right now my sprite/program is…” They could also place a “Help” card on their desk if they struggle with seeking out peer support. Lastly, the  Collaboration Discussion Framework provides a guide for productive peer collaboration.
Use concrete representations tied to computing Many students with learning and cognitive disabilities benefit from starting with concrete representations when developing abstract concepts. Tactile and physical activities in the CS classroom provide this concrete introduction. Teachers can create cards with Scratch or JavaScript commands for students to use to give each other directions to move around the room. They can write a function for a popular dance move. Later, the students can create a similar program with sprites or turtle graphics in a visual programming environment.
Include relatable and interesting context Motivation plays a key role in learning and persevering through challenges. Tying CS activities to familiar concepts and personal interests will help students make meaning of new concepts. Exploring the shortest path (Dijkstra’s) algorithm: Some students go on road trips while others visit friends using public transit systems. Teachers can use this personal experience to create a CS activity related to finding the shortest path between nodes in a graph.

 

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Four Cornell computer science researchers will receive $2.5 million from the National Science Foundation to develop software tools that will improve cybersecurity. The project is exploring a new approach that will make it easier to use cryptography to build more-secure systems. Computing and Information Science researchers on the project are Andrew Myers, Elaine Shi, Greg Morrisett and Rafael Pass (Cornell Tech).

Cryptography, which involves complex mathematical manipulations of data, demands high-level expertise. “It’s easy to make security-critical mistakes when using cryptography to build systems,” Myers said. New secure processing chips must be programmed almost at the level of the computer’s “machine language” of ones and zeros, and also require expertise in cryptography.

“If we are serious about remaining globally competitive, we must continue to invest in research to develop new computer engineering techniques that will stop hackers in their tracks,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York. “The work coming out of Cornell will improve our nation’s cybersecurity and help foster technological innovations that will make us safer and more productive. This funding will allow our brightest minds to find solutions to current and future challenges.”

Research funds will be used to develop a high-level programming language called Viaduct.

“The Viaduct system will automatically translate high-level code into provably secure implementations that use sophisticated cryptography,” said Myers, lead principal investigator.

“It’s clear that our society desperately needs new approaches to security and privacy,” said researcher and CIS Dean Morrisett. “The approach we are exploring should shift the burden of the security details from the programmer to the language environment.”

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Girish and Jaidev Reddy Professor of Practice Mukti Khaire’s book “Culture and Commerce: The Value of Entrepreneurship in Creative Industries” explores the relationship between art and business.

Khaire’s research focuses on entrepreneurship in the creative industries, such as art, advertising, architecture and design, fashion, film, music, publishing, and theater. In particular, she is interested in understanding how entrepreneurs create markets for new categories of cultural goods by constructing their value, while also changing consumers’ beliefs about what attributes of cultural goods are appropriate and valuable.

Description:

Art and business are often described as worlds apart, even diametric opposites. And yet, these realms are close cousins in creative industries where firms bring cultural goods to market, attaching price tags to music, paintings, theater, literature, film, and fashion.

Building on theories of value construction and cultural production, Culture and Commerce details the processes by which artistic worth is decoded, translated, and converted to economic value. Mukti Khaire introduces readers to three industry players: creators, producers (who bring to market and distribute cultural goods), and intermediaries (who critique and rave about them). Case studies of firms from Chanel and Penguin to tastemakers like the Pritzker Prize and The Sundance Institute illuminate how these professionals construct a vital value chain. Highlighting the role of “pioneer entrepreneurs”—who carve out space for radical, new product categories—Khaire illustrates how creative professionals influence our sense of value, shifting consumer behavior and our culture in deep, surprising ways. The book particularly sheds light on how the twin developments shaping our world today – digitalization and globalization – influence entrepreneurship in creative industries and by extension, change culture and society.

Book available for purchase from Stanford University Press.

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Speech Up is a mobile app that will bring fun and accessibility to speech therapy for kids.

Nearly one in 12 (or 7.7%) of U.S. children aged between three and 17 have a disorder related to voice, speech, language, or swallowing, according to this survey carried out in 2012. While speech therapy empowers millions of children every year, it is not always accessible due to geographic or economic reasons. It can also be a somewhat tedious process.

The innovative app takes a gaming approach to speech therapy through puzzles and challenges designed to help kids pronounce words correctly. However, as COO Steven Chen, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’17, explains, the ‘real magic’ is that Speech Up offers real-time feedback as the kids talk into the game, which no other speech therapy app does right now.

“We can then incorporate real speech therapy methodologies and practices that we’ve been able to build in with the help of speech therapists,” he explains. “As well as a proprietary engine that uses machine learning to analyze the best ways to provide feedback.”

The team behind the project are recipients of one of four Cornell Tech Startup Awards, which includes $80,000 in pre-seed funding and $20,000 worth of co-working space in The Bridge at Cornell Tech.

A Dream Team

Each member of the four-person team embodies part of Speech Up. Both CEO David Cheng, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’17, and CTO Luis Serota, Master of Computer Science ’17, grew up attending speech therapy. That personal investment makes Speech Up much “closer to home” says Serota.

Cheng has a background in systems engineering, and industry experience with IBM and Deloitte Consulting. He handles the day-to-day workflow and direction of the company, but also works with Serota developing and building the app. Chen’s professional track record with companies such as Disney and Kabam adds mobile games expertise to the mix.

The fourth team member is Chief Product Officer (CPO) Eliza Bruce, a 2017 MFA graduate of Parsons School of Design , who met her teammates through a collaboration between the two institutions. Bruce leads Speech Up’s design and creative direction, and also brings valuable experience in clinical research.

This dream team first collaborated as classmates tackling businesses challenges during Product Studio in the fall, where they worked on a Google research project. There was great team chemistry, says Cheng, and it made sense for them to continue to work together during Startup Studio in the spring.

While other teams rearranged after Product Studio, Speech Up felt like they’d struck gold. “We had such a good experience that we decided to stay together and work on our studio project together,” he explains.

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The Speech Up team (from left to right): Steven Chen, Luis Serota, David Chang, Eliza Bruce.

Accessible and Engaging

This combination of personal and professional experience allowed the team to develop a very strong focus for Speech Up. The goal was to make the app accessible, affordable and engaging, as well as offer real-time feedback based on scientifically-based speech therapy methods.

Accessibility is essential, says Cheng, who points out that both he and Serota feel fortunate to come from backgrounds with the geographical access and financial resources to attend speech therapy.

“Unfortunately, a lot of kids in either rural areas or from less affluent backgrounds either can’t find a speech therapist near them or can’t afford one.”

Technology, he says, creates a more even playing field. Speech Up will support underserved kids who don’t have access to speech therapy — be that due to geographic or economic circumstances.

Even kids who do have access to speech therapy, he continues, often only attend thirty-minute sessions once a week as it is expensive and there is a shortage of speech therapists. Speech Up will provide an accessible platform that allows kids to practice at home.

For Serota, it is especially important to create something that kids will enjoy. He recalls the drudgery of his own speech therapy, “When I was a kid, I hated having to go home with papers and spreadsheets to do all the time.” It was “onerous.” Now he is relishing the chance to build a fun environment that will be a resource for speech therapy going forward.

Next Steps

The Speech Up team feels humbled to be recipients of a Cornell Tech Startup Award, says Cheng. It represents “Cornell Tech’s commitment to help us beyond graduation and really support the New York City startup ecosystem.”

The award includes $20,000 worth of co-working space in The Bridge at Cornell Tech, where the team will develop Speech Up alongside an impressive array of faculty and business expertise. As Cheng explains,“Not only does it allow us to continue and provide a longer runway, but it also allows us to go and scale up, and get additional resources to help. Because building a game, building a real product, it takes a lot of manpower, a lot of work.”

The award is particularly meaningful to these four entrepreneurs as Speech Up is so built-in to their backgrounds in one way or another. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to “shoot for a dream that we all have” says Cheng.

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Freelancers pick and choose what gigs they take, what companies they work for, and how many hours a day they work. But when it comes to finding insurance that suits their working life, affordable options are hard to come by. Without a reasonable insurance plan, freelancers face the possibility of legal issues and financial losses.

Though working independently certainly comes with risks, a new fintech startup coming out of Cornell Tech, Switch, hopes to alleviate some of the stress of self insurance.

Switch is a platform that uses unique data about independent contractors that allows them to be covered for the duration of a job. Depending on the type of work required and the duration engaged, freelancers will be advised on the best type of coverage for them.

It’s a promising idea that landed the Switch team, Rishav Kanoria Technion-Cornell Dual Master’s Degrees in Connective Media ’17, Aamer Saifuddin Hassanally Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’17, and Mario Rial Amado Master of Engineering in Computer Science ’17, an award of $80,000 in pre-seed funding and $20,000 in co-working space from Cornell Tech.

As more than a third of Americans claim to work as freelancers, this section of the workforce is a large, growing segment of the population. “It’s an attractive market from that standpoint,” said Kanoria. “‘Where do I get covered? How do I make sure I’m not liable?’ Freelancers have these questions but it’s not very clear to both experienced freelancers and those just starting out what’s needed to make their profession much easier.”

It’s also true that independent workers have a lot of disadvantages in the US. “They don’t have access to employee benefits and the government doesn’t have a strict regulatory framework to support independent contractors,” said Hassanally.

Hassanally, whose background involved working as a director for a water infrastructure conglomerate in India before coming to Cornell Tech, is interested in using technology for social development.

“One of the biggest problems freelancers cite is the high cost of self-insurance, so Switch is meant to be a place where they can access benefits that are priced to their specific needs.”

Large corporations often have bargaining leverage with insurance companies simply because they can insure a large number of employees. Freelancers have no such bulk buying power because they are a company of one, and for now, while health insurance is too complicated a business to tackle in its entirety, liability insurance, however, is an easier benefit to tackle.

“We’re still working out the pricing details based upon the partnerships that we’re building with insurance companies,” said Kanoria. “We hope to have our first group of users by the end of this summer to test out Switch. We want to get all of this right before we go to market.”

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Switch, from left to right, Hassanally, Amado, Kanoria.

When they move into the co-working space in The Bridge at Cornell Tech, the Switch team will be busy exploring freelance marketplaces such as TaskRabbit and Handy to better understand freelancer profiles and mitigate on-the-job risks.

The team said that David Tisch, head of Cornell Tech’s Startup Studio, and the Studio team have been amazing help to them. “They put us in touch with business professionals who can guide us through the intricacies of setting up a business,” said Hassanally.

Additionally, the Switch team has been working with students from the Master of Laws in Law, Technology and Entrepreneurship program at Cornell Tech to get a better understanding of potential legal issues around the insurance space.

“Cornell Tech law students were assigned to different startup teams to advise on each business,” said Hassanally. “We felt very fortunate to have them aid us. They connected us to resources and helped us navigate the regulations in the insurance technology sector.”

The specific pricing, Kanoria said, is meant to be in line with the freelancer’s cash flows, and take into account when the freelancer isn’t earning money. At this point, the freelancer could potentially save hard-earned cash for other needs. “Our broader goal for Switch is improving financial health for middle-income Americans,” said Hassanally.

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Imagine what you could measure about the world if you had access to all the photos ever taken. This is a question that fascinates Noah Snavely, associate professor of computer science at Cornell Tech. An abundance of tools can mine data from web-based text, but for many years, the computer vision community has thought of images as the ‘dark matter’ of the web.

Snavely is currently working in the Cornell Graphics and Vision Group, where he develops innovative technologies for unlocking this vast data source. But his fascination with computer vision goes back to his student days.

3D Modeling from 2D Web Images

As a computer science undergrad at the University of Arizona, Snavely become drawn to the challenges of 3D vision, which combines computer vision and graphics, and can be used to infer 3D models of the world from 2D images.

With the launch of photo sharing sites, such as Flickr, Snavely gained access to vast data sets that propelled his work into new territories. He began building 3D models from 2D images downloaded from the Internet.

Every day, he says, tourists take photos, at different times and from different angles, of famous landmarks and upload them to the web.

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Snavely uses tourist photos taken at different angles to construct 3D models.

“There is no coordination between them. They’re just like an unorganized set of photos,” explains Snavely “But from that we can reconstruct a 3D model of that place, and that works for any landmark where people take lots of photos.”

The applications of 3D modeling are many, including measuring and reconstruction. But Snavely was interested in using it to visualize what it is like to be in a location and to be able to move around places and landmarks, like New York City or the Statue of Liberty, observing them from different angles. He wanted to explore how people could experience those landmarks as if they were there.

Precision Image Localization

His innovative work on 3D modeling led to other projects. Snavely developed an image localization technique which could analyze a photograph from anywhere in the world and identify its latitude and longitude, as well as the exact orientation of the camera when the shot was taken by quickly matching to a database of known images. The project was a research collaboration with Cornell Tech Dean Dan Huttenlocher and PhD student Yunpeng Li.

Building on this, in 2012 he co-founded a company called TaggPic with his wife Beth Xie. This technology allowed the position and orientation of photographs to be determined by referencing them against 3D models. The company was ultimately acquired by Google.

“Let’s say I built the model of the Statue of Liberty. Then I could take a new image and, based on how it relates to the 3D model, I could estimate exactly where that image must have been taken to see that particular view of the Statue of Liberty,” Snavely explains.

This technology could also allow for precise tracking and graphics overlay in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), which can be used to provide dynamic tourist and directional information.

To draw graphics on top of a camera image and have it “look like it’s stuck to the world” requires extremely accurate image localization, describes Snavely.

Social Media Images: An Untapped Data Source

Now at Cornell Tech, Snavely has turned his attention to the valuable data locked into social media images. Billions of photographs are uploaded to the web every day and while there are many tools for mining data from text, like tweets and social posts, images are the next frontier, he says.

“They are a large set of data. It’s largely untapped because we don’t have good tools for analyzing it but there’s a lot of information locked into it.”

Snavely is starting by looking at what we can learn about fashion trends by tapping into this data source.

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Snavely presenting “Street Style” at Open Studio.

“How common is it for people to wear red clothing in photographs? Or glasses and hats and ties, any fashion?” he asks. “Does New York City influence other places in terms of fashion? Does Paris influence the US?”

To date, answering such questions has been very painstaking, involving interviews and observations. “The idea is that social media images will make all this much easier,” he says.

Snavely and his team are devising frameworks for analyzing these images; developing technologies that takes raw pixels and extracts facts from them.

“We’re using machine learning for that, deep learning techniques and methods in particular. We want it to be fast and scalable.”

Once they have laid the groundwork, they will look at building a front end and exploration interface on top of that.

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Snavely and his team found that blue collared shirts, plaid shirts and black t-shirts were the most common styles around the world.

The Start of Something New

Snavely first came to Cornell in 2009, after he had completed his PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was on leave at Google in 2014 and 2015, before returning to Cornell. Last year, he moved to Cornell Tech from the Ithaca campus.

He wants his work to have real-life applications, he explains, and was attracted by Cornell Tech’s mission of engagement. And the intimate, friendly environment makes it easy to find collaborators in fields such as graphics and machine learning. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this pioneering thinker also relishes being part of something new.

“Being here close to the start of something is very exciting to me: trying to define what the place is and being a part of that. The culture is great,” he says.

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As a part of Women in Technology and Entrepreneurship in New York (WiTNY), groups of young women recently completed a day long build-a-thon, Connect Me, Alexa!

Their objective: to develop a skill for Ama zon’s Echo to make it easier for senior citizens to interact and communicate with their families, communities and important constituencies.

“Women from high school, undergraduate and graduate school, and women working in the tech industry were all trying to alleviate the frustration senior citizens face when using new technology,” said Melissa Rojas, a current software engineer intern for AOL and a former graduate student of City University of New York, Brooklyn College in New York. “We asked ourselves what problems senior citizens were most likely to have, and worked toward Alexa skills that would make life easier for them.”

An initiative established by Cornell Tech in partnership with the City University of New York (CUNY), WiTNY is designed to help more women enter the tech industry in the New York City. WiTNY helps provide scholarships and internships for women in tech, but also seeks to provide space for collaboration and professional networking for women in high school, undergraduate, and graduate programs with events like build-a-thons and talks with women who hold senior tech positions.

Making A Difference

One element of community WiTNY is fostering are design challenges — or build-a-thons — where tech-minded women form teams to create real products and learn from one another.

“WiTNY’s build-a-thons are different than other hackathons I’ve been to,” said Melissa Chan, a rising sophomore studying cyber security and computer science at John Jay College. “It really brings together a bunch of different women who are of different ages and backgrounds, and it makes participants work on random teams so that everyone gets to socialize.”

These events have had a huge impact on the women in attendance. For a program that’s still less than a year old, Rojas says it’s been life changing for her to have been a part of it so far. “I got involved last summer and was at the first WiTNY event,” said Rojas. “After attending different WiTNY events over the past year, I now know other women in technology. It’s been inspiring to know how they got into technology and how they’ve worked their way up into these top places. For me, it is a big confidence builder.”

Rojas credits a WiTNY internship with helping her get positioned to apply for a job at AOL. “Big companies have so many applicants, it’s really hard to get your foot in the door sometimes,” said Rojas. But through WiTNY events, young women interested in technology careers have the opportunity to network with people from around the industry and other women further along in their tech careers.

New Skills, New Paths

In addition to broadening a young woman’s network, events like WiTNY’s recent build-a-thon give participants the opportunity to learn new skills from one another.

Chan explained that her team was thinking thoroughly about how an elderly person might struggle to remember a difficult password, even though complicated passwords are now generally required for many software applications. “It really made me think from different angles when we were trying to problem solve,” said Chan. “I’m happy it broadened my idea of what cybersecurity can be.”

These kinds of WiTNY events not only help young women build a strong network, but also expose them to new skills. As part of the build-a-thon, many of the women learned how to use the programming language Python—a language that many of the women at the event hadn’t used before.

“I have worked on programs for Google Home before,” said Radhika Kalani, a rising computer science freshman at Baruch College. “But Amazon’s Alexa required me to learn Python so that we could test out our ideas. I’m really thankful that this program pushed me to learn more than I normally would—now I want to buy an Echo and try to develop apps for it on my own.”

Kalani, like Chan, is also unsure of what she might want to specialize in when it comes to the vast field of computer science, but she thinks the build-a-thon, and meeting numerous women in the field through WiTNY, has made her think more seriously about artificial intelligence.

“Because of the build-a-thon, I can see that AI is about much more than getting Amazon Echo to play music,” said Kalani. “It’s an emerging field and I know now there are other paths opening up that I could explore.” Many of the women explained that the build-a-thon helped them think more critically about how diverse groups of people, including the elderly, need to be included within an app’s design thinking process as well.

Even if a young woman’s goal isn’t to be an engineer, Kalani said WiTNY events can help give them important context. “We’re really grateful for this experience and think that even if you don’t like to code, it’s important to know what’s possible and how it applies to other fields.”

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