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In the nearly three years since I joined Cornell Tech, there has been a K-12 computer science revolution growing in Washington D.C. and in New York City, including on Roosevelt Island. It’s a very exciting time for educators committed to preparing students for their digital future. Cornell Tech is proud to be helping to lead that revolution.

Diane Levitt, Sr. Director
K-12 Education, Cornell Tech
diane.levitt@cornell.edu

A little over a year ago, Mayor de Blasio announced Computer Science for All (CS4All), a 10-year, $80 million public-private partnership to bring computer science experiences to every school in New York City. We work closely with CSNYC, the nonprofit helping to drive CS4All, and with the Computer Science unit at the NYC Department of Education. In January, President Obama announced the federal Computer Science for All initiative, introduced during his State of the Union address. This year, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced the first 200 national commitments to CS education, and we’re proud that Cornell Tech’s new Teacher-in-Residence (TIR) program was one of them.

Teacher in Residence

Last year, we tested an idea at PS/IS 217. Would interest and activity around computer science grow if there were a computer science educator on site? We hired a consultant to lead the entire teaching staff through a very introductory series of classes, and to work with a few grades building curriculum. While these were just baby steps, we learned that having a resource within the school, rather than at another organization or university, definitely built confidence and competence in teaching computer science. In fact, educators at PS/IS 217 were so excited about computer science education, they applied to the Department of Education to be a part of the first elementary CS4All Software Engineering Program (called SEP Jr.). I am proud that they were among the 20 schools selected, from over 115 applicants.

Today, PS/IS 217 is humming with computer science activity. Building on the success of the in-house consultant, Cornell Tech has launched the TIR program. The premise is that having a resource to build a teacher’s capacity to integrate computer science as part of the school community, makes the very difficult job of teaching computer science a bit easier. Rather than expecting teachers to get all their training in the evenings, on weekends, or during the summer, the schools we work with have a resident expert. Meg Ray, our first TIR, started in early August, and is now working with the teaching staff at PS/IS 217 once a week to support their implementation of SEP Jr. and computer science education. She is modeling instruction, providing professional development, coaching teachers and working with them to develop curriculum. As Assistant Principal Jennifer Allen told us recently, “We expect every teacher in our building to be incorporating computer science in their classrooms.” That’s a huge and impressive commitment, and we’re happy to learn from and with PS/IS 217 as they make it a reality. The TIR is funded by a grant from the Siegel Family Endowment, with additional funding for Roosevelt Island from Urban American/Brookfield Property Partners.

Let’s Code

We recently held our third “Let’s Code Roosevelt Island” event with PS/IS 217’s middle school.

“I’m in eighth grade, and this is my third time doing this. This year is so fun – it’s the best!” was the enthusiastic endorsement of one student. Nearly 60 Cornell Tech grad students, representing all six of our degree programs, joined the entire middle school in the PS/IS 217 library for a morning of building electrical circuits with conductive copper tape, connecting small coin batteries to LED lights. Once they had mastered the science of the circuit, they created amazing decorations with art materials and light. They worked for two and a half hours and would happily have kept going if recess and lunch hadn’t interrupted. When her mentor asked this student why this experience was so great, she replied, “Because we made something!”

We’ve got a lot more coming up on Roosevelt Island. We will hold a family computing event during Computer Science Education Week, December 5-11 (stay tuned for details soon). As they did last year, the fourth grade will visit us in Chelsea for a tour of Google. They will also spend some time in the Cornell Tech Maker Studio, with its director (and PS/IS 217 parent) designer Niti Parikh.

We also recently hosted our third annual “To Code and Beyond” conference, bringing more than 80 educators, non-profit leaders, policymakers, and funders together to discuss the theme of computer science at play – how informal learning and afterschool can support Computer Science for All. PS/IS 217 Principal Mandana Beckman was among the participants learning how we can use time out of school to expand students’ computing knowledge and opportunity.

All this, and we’re just getting started. One thing we’ve realized is that once we move to the Island (next summer!), our campus will be a classroom for the students of Roosevelt Island, and PS/IS 217 will be a classroom for our graduate students as well. We all have a great deal to teach each other and to learn from each other and our students.

And as we learn what works, we look forward to sharing these strategies with the city and the nation, as we all work to truly bring computer science to all.

Originally appeared in The Main Street Wire

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It’s a cloudy Tuesday morning, and PS/IS 217 third grade teacher Stephanie Ditaranto is turning her class into a human computer. On the carpet in front of her, 27 kids clap, cheer, or groan in unison as she holds up playing cards pulled randomly from a deck in her lap. With each card, the kids must run through a set of rules to see what their response should be.

The cacophony is all part of a new curriculum designed to bring computer science concepts into every grade at PS/IS 217, starting in kindergarten and stretching through middle school. Teachers are implementing the lessons with the help of a pilot program offered by the city’s Computer Science for All (CS4All) initiative, as well as hands-on instructional support from Cornell Tech.

The curriculum also puts the Island’s public school at the forefront of a national effort to better incorporate science and technology into the classroom, and positions the school as a potential model for how computer science is taught at the elementary-school level citywide.

“It’s really cool being able to teach computer science to the younger kids and get them excited about it,” says Ditaranto, “And to show them that this is something you can be good at, and something you could have a future in if you really want.”

Coding for All

Announced in 2015, CS4All is a 10-year initiative to bring computer science instruction to all New York City public school students by partnering with private and nonprofit organizations.

In June, PS/IS 217 was one of 11 elementary schools selected from more than 100 applicants for the city’s Elementary School Computer Science (SEP Jr) pilot program. The program provides a computer science curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade, along with ongoing teacher training and teaching materials. How each school incorporates the program is largely left to the school’s administration to decide.

For PS/IS 217, winning a seat in the SEP Jr program created an opportunity to build on its partnership with Cornell Tech, which adopted the school as part of the agreement to build a new campus on the Island. In September, the school welcomed Meg Ray, a teacher-in-residence hired by Cornell Tech to provide hands-on training to the school’s teachers.

Funded through a three-year grant by the Siegel Family Endowment, Ray spends one day a week at PS/IS 217 working with teachers to incorporate the SEP Jr curriculum, and to adapt lessons to the needs of different students.

“I was a teacher and I know how hard it is to have someone from the outside come in and say, ‘Hey, so I know you just met me but I want to co-teach with you in your classroom,’” says Ray. A former computer science and special education teacher in New York City, Ray is currently on the writing committee for the national K-12 Computer Science standards. “The teachers here have been so warm and welcoming and really engaged in the process. It’s a new subject area for some of them, and you can see that they want to do it right.”

Real World Lessons

While the thought of teaching elementary kids to code may conjure images of students sitting in front of computer screens tapping keys, in fact, many of the lessons take place without any computer at all.

“You don’t start teaching math in high school and start with algebra,” says Ray. “Computer science is the same way. We’re not starting with programming right away. We’re starting with basic concepts that they’ll build on.” In the lower grades, many of the lessons are about thinking like a computer programmer: following steps, sorting, and debugging problems.

Ray recounts a recent lesson in a kindergarten class in which the teachers gave the students marshmallows and popsicle sticks and tasked them with building a tower. “We gave them [these materials] knowing they would have a hard time working with them. When their structure fell over, the kids got excited at having found a ‘bug’ in their structure, and they would try again. We purposely put them in a frustrating situation so a teacher could help coach them through that frustration.”

Students also spend time at the computer, playing games and solving puzzles that lay the groundwork for writing code. Later in the school year, students in higher grades will begin working with programmable robots.

Although the SEP Jr program is designed for the elementary grades, Diane Levitt, senior director of K-12 education at Cornell Tech, says the Teacher-in-Residence program will extend through middle school as well, expanding the curriculum to all grades.

Teaching Model

 
Cornell’s Teacher-In-Residence
Meg Ray talks with PS/IS 217
kindergarteners.

While PS/IS 217 is far from being the only New York City school working to incorporate a computer science curriculum, Levitt believes it’s one of the schools pushing the envelope the furthest.

“The leadership of [PS/IS 217] have 100 percent bought into the idea that this matters,” says Levitt. “There are very few schools in the city like that. A lot of teachers who want to teach computer science are fighting with their principals to do it. PS/IS 217 doesn’t have that problem. They have set an expectation that every [teacher] will integrate computer science into their class. That is highly unusual. I just think it shows a remarkable growth mindset at the school. I think that’s a difference in how you see SEP Jr implemented here.”

Levitt also sees the Teacher-in-Residence (TIR) program as a key ingredient in the school’s future success. She believes that having someone who can serve as an internal support in the school – during school hours – helps foster a sense of ownership with the teachers. “After-hours staff development isn’t as practical for teachers who have already put in a lot of time and energy. That’s why we realized that putting someone in the building (where kids and teachers are) is, we think, the best strategy.”

Levitt says the TIR program continues to be a work in progress. According to Levitt, a research agreement with the Department of Education requires Cornell Tech to regularly survey teachers to see what is effective and what isn’t. “We have very little research telling us how to teach computer science to elementary kids. And we all have limited resources so we need to make the best use of our time and money,” says Levitt. “It’s in the interest of our funder that we share what we learn with the rest of the city. In that sense, 217 will be a model for the city.”

Future Partners

With Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island campus scheduled to open in the fall of 2017, Levitt says she’s looking forward to deepening the relationship between the two schools.

“Once [students] can just walk down the street to our campus, I think there’s going to be a lot more of them learning in our space and us learning in their space,” predicts Levitt. “It’s going to feel more like one classroom.”

Levitt acknowledges that the university’s relationship with PS/IS 217 got off to a rocky start three years ago, but she says the two schools have managed to create a strong partnership. “We were like an arranged marriage that first year. Since then we have built such an incredible, trusting relationship. Luckily we hung in there with each other and met frequently.”

In addition to the TIR program, Cornell Tech hosts several engineering and coding events throughout the school year. On a recent Friday, Cornell Tech graduate students hosted an event for middle school students, teaching them how to create electrical circuits using copper tape, cell batteries, and LED lights, and then helping them create their own Halloween decorations. In the spring, fourth graders will visit Cornell Tech’s Maker Studio in Chelsea.

Levitt says there’s much more to come. “We really want to make what happens between Cornell Tech and the 217 middle school extra special. All these skills you build in kindergarten through fifth grade get real when you enter middle school. Writing code becomes more possible. We’re going to do great work in the whole school, but I really feel we’re going to be able to do some things at the middle school that no one else is doing in New York. And I’m super-excited about that.

“I love working with this community. It’s not always easy, but it’s rewarding. There are people in this community holding our feet to the fire – as they should be. There are a lot of watchful eyes making sure we do the right thing by that school.”

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Innovators in the health tech space today are betting that by leveraging data and technology, we can finally make progress on some of America’s most difficult health challenges — tough problems like cancer, cardiovascular disease and stroke, which together account for 7 in 10 deaths and 86 percent of the nation’s overall health costs.

Operators of commercial airlines today know when a tire or valve needs repair ahead of time using so-called “predictive maintenance” techniques. Using these same techniques, operators of manufacturing plants are able to confirm the usability of greases and oils on an ongoing basis, and correlate equipment temperature with future mechanical problems. Similarly, “P4 Medicine” hopes to transform medicine by leveraging four interconnected strategies: Prevention, Prediction, Personalization, and Participation.

Prevention

Patients interact with the healthcare system for a total of 10 hours per year on average. What about the remaining 8,750?

That’s where technology comes in. Professor Deborah Estrin, founder of the MS in IS, Health Tech program at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, is leading the charge. She believes that, in the future, resorting to medicine will increasingly be viewed as a failure of prevention.

“Lifestyle behaviors are widely recognized as drivers for our most pervasive medical challenges,” Estrin said. “Consumer technologies and personal analytics offer the greatest and most scalable opportunities for making the ‘healthier’ choice the consumer’s actual choice.”

Prediction

Marketers have been using analytics for years to measure the success of their campaigns and websites. But now with smart and wearable devices, valuable health data and analytics are being used in healthcare to predict potential health concerns and provide better care for patients.

eCare21 is one such company. Using smartphones, Fitbits, Bluetooth and sensors, the application collects valuable health data from senior citizens and compiles a dashboard for the patient’s doctors and caregivers so they can provide proactive care.

Personalization

While the world has been obsessed with big data, Professor Estrin in her 2013 TEDMED talk called attention to the power of “small data” — that is, our personal data — which she describes as a digital social pulse capable of sounding vital early warning signals. Small data, she argues, could be mined for critical insights around health, and ultimately even make the difference between life and death.

How to not only capture that data, but leverage it as a tool to reciprocally shape behavior, has long been a topic of interest for Wired’s Thomas Goetz. In 2011, he wrote a seminal paper on feedback loops, and followed it up that year with his book The Decision Tree: How to Make Better Choices and Take Control of Your Health.

More recently, Goetz has overseen the development of Start, a new app that helps patients living with depression stick to their prescription protocols. The app provides highly personalized health care, and support and guidance tailored to each patient, over a six-month period.

The goal? Making the patient “an equal partner [in their health],” according to Goetz.

Diet and nutrition are a final area where the mandate for personalization can be seen — particularly in the emerging field of nutrigenomics. Compared to nutrigenomics, the recent popular diet fads — whether South Beach or Atkins — seem primitive and treating only of symptoms. Before counting carbs, nutrigenomics asks the foundational question, “What’s your optimal diet, based on genotype?”

It’s equally important to find a diet that each person will stick to; as we know even the most successful diets are usually followed by some regression to previous behavior. With the growth of online grocery shopping, restaurant rating, and food photo sharing, we now have the wealth of data needed to build personalized diets that are linked to individuals preferences, capabilities and food availability.

Participation

Participation involves everything from patient decision-making to self-medication, self-monitoring, education, goal-setting and taking part in physical care. Central to all of these is the tenet that medicine of the future will be oriented around patients themselves — that it will be personalized, informed and data-driven.

This means rethinking fundamental aspects of our current approach to health care.

Take research studies, for example. Thanks to technology, longstanding obstacles to widespread participation in them — obstacles ranging from the inconvenience of recurring visits to a lab, say, or the need to reside in geographic proximity to a clinic with a relevant specialization — are finally being overturned.

Professor Estrin has been a driving force in this effort. One project she initiated, ResearchStack, is a framework for building research study apps on Android. Its designed to be functionally similar to Apple’s ResearchKit, albeit with one critical caveat: it’s accessible to those who don’t own iPhones. That’s about three quarters of the total US population.

Wired’s Goetz has a similar project currently underway. He is co-founder and CEO of Iodine, an app that works a little bit like Yelp, only for healthcare. It has 100,000 members, all of whom can rate medications, discuss side effects and share personal experiences.

In an increasingly networked society — and with the Internet of Things (IoT) expected to surpass mobile phones as the largest category of connected devices in 2018 — the opportunity to improve health outcomes through data and technology is undeniable. Yet, what today’s health tech innovators are realizing is that only by first rethinking our health and wellness paradigms will we be able to do so.

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ITHACA, N.Y. — The Cornell University Board of Trustees today unanimously elected Martha E. Pollack, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan, Cornell’s 14th president. Pollack will assume the presidency on April 17, 2017.

The board’s vote followed the selection of Pollack by a Presidential Search Committee that was formed in April 2016 following the death on March 6 of President Elizabeth Garrett. Hunter R. Rawlings III, who has served as Cornell’s interim president since April 25, will remain in his current role through April 16, 2017.

“I am humbled and honored to have been elected to lead this great university,” Pollack said. “As a private university with a public mission, Cornell is the embodiment of my own deeply held belief in the ability of knowledge to improve the human condition. I can’t wait to get started, and I look forward to meeting and working with Cornell’s outstanding faculty, students, staff and alumni in Ithaca, New York City and around the globe.”

“I am delighted to welcome Martha Pollack as Cornell’s next president,” said Robert S. Harrison ‘76, chairman of the board of trustees. “She is the perfect person to take the helm of Cornell at this important moment in our history. She has successfully managed a comparably complex institution and is a bold thinker who will inspire our faculty and students in Ithaca and across all of our campuses; her academic background in computer science will serve us extremely well as we open the Cornell Tech Roosevelt Island campus next year; and her familiarity with the issues facing academic medicine will be invaluable as we continue to grow Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.”

Pollack was appointed to her current position at the University of Michigan in 2013. As the university’s chief academic officer and chief budget officer, she is responsible for the academic enterprise, which serves more than 43,000 students with over 16,000 faculty and staff, has annual operating revenues of $3.4 billion, and includes 19 schools and colleges, a number of freestanding research units, libraries and museums, and an array of academic support units. She also oversees the academic programs, ensuring that they maintain the highest level of quality and a persistent commitment to diversity and equity, and that the university’s administrative functions are aligned with its academic mission.

Prior to becoming provost, Pollack served the University of Michigan as vice provost for academic and budgetary affairs, dean of the School of Information, and associate chair for computer science and engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She has been on the faculty at Michigan since 2000.

At Cornell, Pollack will have tenured appointments in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science. She currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, the academic partnership between Cornell and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology at Cornell Tech, Cornell’s newest New York City graduate campus, currently operating out of the Google building in Chelsea and moving to its permanent Roosevelt Island location next summer.

A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Pollack’s research has been in the area of artificial intelligence, where she has published widely on topics including automated planning, natural-language processing, temporal reasoning and constraint satisfaction. A particular focus of her work has been the design of intelligent technology to assist people with cognitive impairment, a topic on which she testified before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Aging. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Intel, DARPA and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

In addition to receiving a number of awards for her research, she has been honored for her professional service, for example, with the University of Michigan’s Sarah Goddard Power Award in recognition of her efforts to increase the representation of and climate for women and underrepresented minorities in science and engineering. She has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, as president of AAAI, as a member of the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Division, and as a member of the board of directors of the Computing Research Association.

Before joining the University of Michigan, Pollack was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the technical staff at SRI International. Pollack received her bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, completing a self-designed interdisciplinary major in linguistics. She earned her M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

She has been married for 32 years to Ken Gottschlich, an engineer and jazz musician by training. They have two grown children, Anna and Nicholas.

“The search committee set out to find a bold and strategic leader who would engage the entire Cornell community in furthering the university’s core mission,” said Jan Rock Zubrow ‘77, chairman of the Executive Committee of the board of trustees and of the Presidential Search Committee. “In Martha Pollack, we have found that person, and more. Recognized for her collaborative leadership style, she is uniquely qualified to bring together Cornell’s outstanding colleges, schools and campuses to elevate and align the entirety of our great university.”

Zubrow led a search committee of 19 individuals representing a cross-section of Cornell constituencies, including trustees, faculty members, undergraduate and graduate students, employees, senior administrators, and alumni. The committee was advised by two former board chairs and a former chair of the Weill Cornell Medicine Board of Overseers.

“I congratulate Jan Rock Zubrow and the search committee for their outstanding choice of Martha Pollack as Cornell’s 14th president,” said Rawlings. “As president of the Association of American Universities, I had an opportunity to work with Martha. She will be a great president, and her hands-on knowledge of Cornell Tech will help to solidify the growing collaborations and synergies among Cornell’s upstate and downstate campuses. I look forward to working with her over the coming months on a smooth transition.”

Cornell University is the federal land-grant institution of New York state, a private endowed university, a member of the Ivy League, and a partner of the State University of New York. With campuses in Ithaca, New York, New York City and Doha, Qatar, Cornell’s colleges and schools encompass more than 100 fields of study. Cornell has been described as the first truly American university because of its founders’ revolutionarily egalitarian and practical vision of higher education, and is dedicated to its mission of outreach and public service.

Cornell University has television, ISDN and dedicated Skype/Google+ Hangout studios available for media interviews.

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Computer-generated image of the Verizon Executive Education Center and Hotel
Computer-generated image of the graduate hotel
Computer-generated image of the Verizon Executive Education Center and Hotel
Computer-generated image of the Verizon Executive Education Center and Hotel
Computer-generated image of the Verizon Executive Education Center and Hotel

An aerial view of the hotel and Verizon Executive Education Center. Image courtesy Snøhetta

The view of the campus from the North. Image courtesy Snøhetta

The courtyard between the Verizon Executive Education Center and the Bloomberg Center. Image courtesy Snøhetta

A view of the hotel and Verizon Executive Education Center from the North. Image courtesy Snøhetta

A view of the Verizon Executive Education Center and hotel from the South. Image courtesy Snøhetta

Earlier this week, the plans for the Verizon Executive Education Center and Hotel on our Roosevelt Island campus were released. The buildings were designed by Snøhetta and are the final part of phase one of the campus.

DNAinfo reports:

The two buildings, which are connected by a shared hall, occupy the space nearest to Cornell Tech’s entrance, closer to the Queensboro Bridge, and is meant to be “the front door for the campus,” said Andrew Winters, the school’s senior director of capital projects.

The 195-room hotel will be made of metal panels and glass set upon a platform, which opens out to a outdoor plaza for the community. The lodging will primarily serve visitors from out of town attending business and academic conferences, students and professors from around the world, as well as the general public, according to Winters.

Read the full article on DNAinfo.

Other Media Coverage:

Curbed

The Real Deal

The Architect’s Newspaper

New York Yimby

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Data is one of the biggest trends in technology.

From healthcare to marketing, everyone wants more of it. Data are collected in a thousand different ways, but just as important as how it’s collected, is how it is interpreted.

That’s where Chao Ding, a quantitative analyst at Google, comes in. He and others in the field of data analysis are responsible for making data valuable for companies.

Ding finished his undergraduate study in Tsinghua University of China and graduated from the PhD program in Operations Research at Cornell in 2012.

In a Q&A, Ding shares what a career as a quantitative analyst looks like and why it’s an exciting field.

What types of roles were you considering before graduation?
I was mostly considering quantitative roles in either tech or financial industry.

Why did you choose your current role?
In one of my research projects with Professors Topaloglu and Rusmevichientong, I had to run some big simulations on Amazon AWS. Later on, I also got interested in AWS’s dynamic pricing strategy for spot instances and attempted to develop a research topic on it. The research topic didn’t pan out but such experience made me interested in cloud computing in general. So when this opportunity within an Operations Research team at Google working on cloud computing problems arose, it sounded like a great fit for me.

How do you expect your career path to look like in a few years?
There are a few possibilities I am exploring. One is to go deeper in my current area of cloud computing resource efficiency. As Moore’s Law is coming to end, this area is becoming more and more important. We need to look at this area more systematically, maybe even define quantitative theories and draw academic research attention in this area. Another one is to grow/expand my machine learning experience, which is on the trajectory to take over the world.

""

What is a typical day like?
In the morning clear up emails and respond to urgent requests if there is any. Then I meet with project teammates (mostly involving software engineers and quant analysts from multiple teams) to get update on what each other is up to and discuss any issues.

I’ll then bug engineers to learn how things work in current system, write queries or R/Python scripts, stare at the result, and virtualize the data to get a handle of what the data is saying.

I also bounce ideas off engineers about what needs to be done to improve a current system and provide insights based on data analysis. Then I discuss with quantitative colleagues (quant analysts, research scientists) on concrete technical / modeling problems.

If needed, I clear up code and send it to colleagues for review. I also review colleagues’ code, document my ideas and summarize findings.

What’s the most useful thing you learned in school that you still use today?
The most basic things, like probability distribution and optimization concepts, are most useful for me. Not necessarily because I use them directly, but having the basic theories in the back of mind helps me a lot to understand why things are the way they are in an abstract level, and enables me to see what might be missing and could be improved.

What’s one thing you wish you had learned in school/earlier?
I wish I got to know more application problems in which OR and in general analytical methodologies can be used. This would help to expand vision and find what interests you the most.

What’s your advice to a student hoping to get into this field?
 Establish a solid analytical foundation, you can’t learn everything and a solid foundation will greatly help you learn new things as needed. Follow your curiosity as it’s the best teacher.

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When Stephane Levy came to New York the summer after his first year of law school in 2000, the city was far from being the technological hub that it is today.

“There really weren’t a lot of firms that specialized in startups,” Levy said. “I was fortunate to work with a partner who did some startup work, and I thought that it was fascinating. Having clients who were closer to my age, who would rely on my advice and judgment when I was still a relatively young associate, it made a difference to me.”

Sixteen years later, not only has New York emerged as one of the startup capitals of the world, but Levy is working closely with the biggest companies in Silicon Alley as a partner at law firm Cooley LLP and member of its Emerging Companies and Venture Capital practice groups.

So of course when Cornell Tech launched its year-long Master of Laws (LLM) degree in Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, it made sense that Levy would be asked to help teach the specialized skills necessary to assist an emerging fleet of technology companies navigate the intricate and dynamic digital ecosystem and economy.

The Path to Cornell Tech
Levy was contacted by Chuck Whitehead, director of the LLM program, before Cornell Tech had even opened its doors to students.

“He was laying the groundwork really early on,” said Levy. “He wanted to learn more about [my] practice and get [me] involved in the law school.”

So four years ago, Levy got a group of Cooley tech lawyers together to co-teach a course at Cornell Law School called “Emerging Growth Companies and Venture Capital Financing,” which, with the distance between New York City and Ithaca, consisted of both in-person and virtual classes. Naturally, when Cornell Tech launched its LLM program, it made sense for Levy to be a part of that as well.

Levy completed his first module at Cornell Tech with a series of lectures on what tech lawyers need to know during the formation of startups — covering everything from funding to co-founder partnerships.

“Everyone has seen The Social Network,” Levy said, referencing the film which included Mark Zuckerberg’s various legal complications related to the founding of Facebook.”If the students had taken a startup formation class, they might have avoided a lawsuit.”

Levy’s lessons from inside startup life have resonated with students.

“He was incredibly insightful,” said Max Paterson, LLM ’17. “You can read all about [stock issuance and founders agreements] in a book or check out some blogs online, but Stephane lives and breathes it. And it came across in the lecture. He had great examples from real practice, and he was able to translate what we could expect as a lawyer in this environment.”

Developing a New Class of Tech Lawyers
The lawyers who make up Cornell Tech’s LLM program come from a wide range of backgrounds. For example, Paterson has practiced IP law in Canada. Others have specialized in art law. But they are all drawn to being at the forefront of the entrepreneurial economy.

“Associates in our practice have their voices heard in the way they just aren’t in other practice areas,” said Levy. “You could be a fourth or fifth year graduate and you could be advising a CEO or attending board meetings.”

And there is a need for more experienced lawyers in this particular field.

“We all know what happened in Wall Street in 2009,” said Levy. “Now people are beginning to think that maybe they can do things for themselves, not rely on the paycheck and take destiny into their own hands.”

New York has become a base for startup enterprises. The tech talent has moved here, and now law has to catch up.

“[Cornell Tech’s LLM] is a great program,” Levy said. “It’s a nice testament to the progress NYC has made to be a part of the tech ecosystem.”

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New renderings of the hotel and conference center on our Roosevelt Island campus were recently released in DNAinfo.

The two buildings, which are connected by a shared hall, occupy the space nearest to Cornell Tech’s entrance, closer to the Queensboro Bridge, and is meant to be “the front door for the campus,” said Andrew Winters, the school’s senior director of capital projects.

The 195-room hotel will be made of metal panels and glass set upon a platform, which opens out to a outdoor plaza for the community. The lodging will primarily serve visitors from out of town attending business and academic conferences, students and professors from around the world, as well as the general public, according to Winters.

Read the full article on DNAinfo.

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Two Sigma, in partnership with Cornell Tech, today announced the public launch of Halite, a programming game in which players code bots that compete head-to-head to overtake a virtual grid. Halite provides a fun way to learn and apply AI, machine learning, and other advanced algorithms in a collaborative, competitive game setting by writing smart bots. Designed for coding enthusiasts of all levels of experience, Halite creates an engaging game environment to learn, write, and visualize your code in action. Users can track their own bots as well as their competitors’ progress—either globally or within private groups at a company, school, or club—by viewing a real-time leaderboard. The game will be released for a three-month competition, and the success of each bot will be correlated with the creativity and sophistication of its code.

The game was initially developed within Two Sigma by two summer interns as a four-week internal competition to promote creativity and healthy competition amongst the company’s engineers. “At Two Sigma, we’re focused on bringing creativity to all that we do. We realized that two of our summer interns had achieved something special when we had the entire company uploading bots into this game. It goes to show that you never know where innovation will come from,” said Matt Adereth, a senior engineer at Two Sigma .

Cornell Tech will facilitate Halite’s public launch and provide ongoing game support and community management, empowering players to get better, learn and have fun. “Like chess, Halite’s rules are simple to understand but challenging to master, providing an element of continuous learning that we believe will resonate well with the developer community,” said Arnaud Sahuguet, head of the Foundry at Cornell Tech , which focuses on productizing ideas and academic research.

Two Sigma sought out Cornell Tech as its launch partner given the organizations’ shared commitment to applying a product mindset, emphasizing creativity in problem-solving, and supporting the burgeoning tech scene in New York City. “The shared values and complimentary skill sets of our organizations made this collaboration really productive from the start,” said Emily Malloy, a member of the Business Innovation and Growth team at Two Sigma .

To get in on the action and begin coding your own bot, visit https://halite.io/ today!

The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought—

Sun Tzu

About Cornell Tech
Cornell Tech develops pioneering leaders and technologies for the digital age. 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. Cornell Tech’s temporary campus has been up and running at Google’s Chelsea building since 2012, with a growing world-class faculty, and about 150 master’s 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 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 Two Sigma
Two Sigma is a technology company dedicated to finding value in the world’s data. Since its founding in 2001, Two Sigma has built an innovative platform that combines extraordinary computing power, vast amounts of information, and advanced data science to produce breakthroughs in investment management, insurance and related fields. Today, Two Sigma manages approximately $37 billion in assets, employs more than 1000 people and has offices in New York, Hong Kong, Houston and London. For more information, please visit www.twosigma.com

 

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This semester, LLM professor of law James Grimmelmann, in addition to teaching Intellectual Property Law, is directing the Law Tech Speaker Series on campus. Cindy Cohn, Executive Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was a recent guest speaker. Professor Grimmelmann spoke to her about her work with what may to be the country’s leading defender of online civil liberties. Cohn and her team at EFF have litigated cases involving NSA surveillance, malware-infested DRM, copyright trolls, hackable voting machines, takedown abuses, and much, much more.

JAMES GRIMMELMANN: You’re the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which you’ve been working with since 1993. What does the EFF do and how did you decide that this was what you wanted to dedicate your career to?

CINDY COHN: The EFF is the world’s leading nonprofit dedicated to defending free speech, privacy, and innovation at the intersection of law and technology. We use three tools: advocacy, technology and law to try to make sure that when you go online, your rights go with you. We bring lawsuits to try to set the law in the right place, we build technologies that are aimed at encrypting the web and protecting your privacy and security when you go online, and we work to educate people about what’s really going on when they go online. [We] help people make their voices heard on issues that impact them in the digital world.

I knew that I wanted to help make the world a better place and that’s why I went to law school. But I kind of fell into digital issues. I met some early Internet folks in about 1990, before the creation of the World Wide Web, including EFF founder John Gilmore, and they were talking about how important this new global communications tool was going to be. I found it fascinating and exciting. So when John asked me around 1993 to handle one of the early Internet cases—Bernstein v. DOJ, which was about freeing encryption technology from governmental regulation—I said, “Yes!” That was so fun that I’ve been working in this area ever since I formally joined EFF in 2000.

JG: In the 1990s, you litigated Bernstein v. United States, which established that software can be speech protected by the First Amendment. Two decades later, how do you see those issues playing out?

CC: Sometimes it does feel like that movie Groundhog Day to me. We thought with the recognition that “code is speech,” and the application of it to the encryption regulations, that we had won the issue. But, apparently, the government didn’t [see it that way], and it was with great dismay that we realized, due to the Snowden revelations, that the government had continued to attack and undermine encryption and other security tools relied on by billions of people around the world. The attack on Google’s undersea lines connecting its servers was a big wake-up call—for us, for Google, and for many others.

But the First Amendment implications of regulating code have continued to be a mechanism for dissuading the government from wading into the development of free and open source tools. It wasn’t the core reason, but I think it was important in getting the government to back down in the Apple v. FBI case. But the doctrine is still in its infancy as a matter of judicial opinions, so we’ll see as it goes along.

JG: Sometimes you file briefs supporting technology companies, sometimes you sue them. How do you navigate your relationships with industry?

CC: We stand with them when they do the right thing by their customers and the public interest and we oppose them when they don’t.

In general, I find that technology companies get this and recognize that we’re straight shooters—they may not agree with us, but they understand that we cannot be bought and also that we’re not just haters who will oppose anything they do. Our position will be based on our evaluation of whether they are doing the right thing.

JG: The EFF may be scrappy, but it’s just one team of attorneys. How do you pick your battles?

CC: It’s an art rather than a science. We look for whether a situation will set precedent, whether we think that we can make a difference given our limited resources and whether it’s vital to the Internet as a whole or just to a few people. The hardest thing we do is to turn people down when they seek help but we do have a vibrant network of lawyers who we can refer people to. We try to get some help for everyone who comes to us, even if it’s not EFF representation.

JG: How do you find lawyers who can speak technobabble and technologists who can speak legalese and get them to work well together? What should someone who wants to make a difference in technology law do to be fluent in both?

CC: We’re lucky in that, often, they come to us. But it’s a process. We screen applicants very carefully for this—technologists get asked to explain IP addresses, for example, and write blog posts, lawyers get the same on issues where tech and law overlap. We also help our employees develop that skill over time and have many meetings and conversations with both lawyers and technologists in the room so that they talk things through directly. That role of translator is so important and we work hard to develop that skill in our staff.

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