Anjana Rajan, a renowned technology executive, social entrepreneur, and applied cryptographer, joins Cornell Tech’s Public Interest Technology initiative (PiTech) as an Entrepreneur in Residence. In this new role, she will work on launching new technology ventures that address important human rights and national security issues.
“The purpose of the PiTech initiative is to bring together world-class engineering talent, a focus on entrepreneurial innovation, and a commitment to social progress,” says Professor Deborah Estrin, Associate Dean for Impact. “We are delighted to have Anjana return to Cornell to help foster an environment for creative and impactful solutions.”
Before joing the PiTech Initiative, Anjana was the Chief Technology Officer of Polaris, one of the largest anti-human trafficking NGOs in the United States. She served on the organization’s executive team and led Polaris’s engineering, security, and technology departments. In this role, Anjana architected Polaris’s web3 and human rights vision, built a robust strategy to defend the organization against disinformation threats caused by violent extremist groups, and created “Mission Engineering,” a leadership framework that inspires technologists to build solutions for complex and dangerous problems.
Previously, Anjana lived in London and worked at Palantir, where she served as a Commanding Officer for a deployment in the Middle East and worked across commercial and international government projects. Prior to joining Palantir, Anjana worked as a technologist at Johnson & Johnson focusing on building new software products across global healthcare markets.
Anjana returns to Cornell Tech after serving as an inaugural Visiting Practitioner last year and herself studying at Cornell. She was a Knight Scholar at Cornell’s Engineering School and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Operations Research and Information Engineering.
“I am deeply impressed by Cornell Tech’s PiTech initiative and the way they are shaping the future generation of engineering talent”, says Rajan. “I am excited to return to my alma mater as an Entrepreneur in Residence to incubate new ideas.”
Though influencing is a seemingly more accessible space than more traditional entertainment careers, the lack of standardization within this work environment has made the business obscure.
Most obviously, what Kaveat co-founders Elizabete Ludborza, a micro-influencer herself, and Dorothee Grant, a model, noticed was the frequency with which predatory contracts were being signed. Both women had signed these kinds of unfavorable contracts themselves and, in the 2021 fall semester at Cornell Tech, shared their experiences of watching brands and agencies prey on the young women who often populate these industries.
“The only reason I noticed the unfair nature of my contracts is because I have a law background. Most influencers don’t have that,” says Ludborza. “There is a huge power and knowledge imbalance when entering into ‘exciting’ and ‘career-changing’ contracts, which actually mean that you might not be paid for your work or may even contain onerous clauses without your knowledge.”
Kaveat is one of the recent winners of Cornell Tech’s 2022 Startup Awards, a capstone to the Cornell Tech Startup Studio curriculum, garnering pre-seed funding of $100,000 as well as a co-working space in the Tata Innovation Center. The team joins a large list of Cornell Tech Startup alums who have gone on to be acquired by large companies like Nike, Adobe and Peloton.
Kaveat Co-Founders Elizabete Ludborza, COO (left) and Dorothee Grant, CEO (right).
Ludborza and Grant met in an Entrepreneurship class at Cornell Tech and came to realize that confusing contracts were an issue across industries, and sought to find a solution that could be seamlessly integrated into not only the lives of influencers and models, but also that of an everyday person having to deal with a contract. The two were inspired by Model Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting “fair treatment, equal opportunity, and more sustainable practices in the fashion industry.”
Modeling, though more established than influencing, is an industry that has standardized harmful and predatory practices. The field is notorious for harassment of models, and other creative artists involved in the process are not afforded basic labor protections.
The Kaveat platform analyzes contracts and provides users with simple and clear explanations of the content of their contracts. What they are not is a digital lawyer — their goal isn’t to provide and replace legal professionals, in fact, the app will also serve as a space to connect those who are seeking legal advice with specialized professionals that can help users move forward with legal action.
In the future, the founders hope to see Kaveat used not only to help young entrepreneurs navigate the influencing and modeling industries, but also make the lives of anyone interacting with contracts, from freelancers to small business owners, easier.
The pair created Kaveat as part of the Cornell Tech Startup Studio program, a critical component of the Cornell Tech master’s experience. The Startup Studio course is a chance for students to combine program disciplines, from computer science to urban tech to law, and develop ideas and prototypes for their startup in an academic setting. In doing so, they paired with software engineer Christine Shen, who is working full-time as Chief Technology Officer and a founding member at Kaveat.
The Kaveat app is currently in product development. Prospective users can join the waitlist here.
A multidisciplinary team of Cornell researchers is collaborating to elevate the value of home care workers while improving their working conditions and patient outcomes.
“Stop it, stop it!” Yanick Pierre-Louis, 68, slapped her knees, frustrated they wouldn’t stop trembling. Again, her body refused to do what she wanted.
She had just spent an excruciating 25 minutes walking, grimacing with each step, from her recliner in her Brooklyn home to her front door and back, leaning on her walker. Marie Dorvilne, her home care worker since 2017, walked behind Yanick and circled her arms around her torso. She used her knee to help Yanick bend her own.
Besides rheumatoid arthritis in her knees and shoulders, Yanick struggles with gout, diabetes, coronary artery disease, memory issues, headaches, and incontinence. She is a breast cancer survivor.
Source: PHI’s Workforce Data Center
When they made it back inside, Marie eased Yanick down to the recliner. “I don’t turn my back until I know she is on the chair – sitting, not standing,” says Marie, a certified nursing assistant with 18 years of experience in the profession. “I don’t trust her to stand for one minute.” She elevated Yanick’s feet in a recliner and rubbed Yanick’s knees with swift, gentle strokes, her light blue nails making a circular blur. “You’ll be all right, you’ll be OK,” she says. In a few minutes, Yanick’s knees stopped trembling.
Between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., Marie is Yanick’s bather, dresser, cook, companion, cheerleader and health care manager. She monitors Yanick’s blood pressure, gives her medications three times a day, times her meals to keep her diabetes in check, schedules and takes her to medical appointments, and alerts doctors and Yanick’s daughter to changes in her health. That’s after an eight-hour night shift, taking care of 12 patients at a nursing home. She has one Saturday off every other week.
“Some people have time to relax, but I don’t have time to relax,” Marie says. “But in a way, I feel like I’m not working. I feel like I’m helping her. I look at it like she’s my mother.”
Marie’s caregiving inspired Yanick’s doctor, Dr. Madeline Sterling ’08, assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, alongside experts from the ILR School and Cornell Tech, to launch an ambitious, multidisciplinary research program aimed at elevating the value of home care workers – which includes home health aides, home attendants and nursing assistants – while improving both their working conditions and their patients’ outcomes. In three years, the team has partnered with the country’s largest health care worker union to produce more than 20 academic papers that aim to reshape the way policymakers view this critical workforce. In June, they began clinical testing of one of their interventions.
Dr. Madeline Sterling ’08, assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, talks with Yanick Pierre-Louis, her patient, on a video call. (Lindsay France/Cornell University)
The research illuminates how the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the value of these workers – mostly middle-aged immigrant women of color – while the demand for their services is at a historic high. Yet here in New York state, they are paid on average $15 per hour – about $19,000 per year – and their work is chronically overlooked and undervalued by care teams.
The technology available to them is often out of date and rudimentary – designed mainly to track the workers rather than provide them with tools and support. And though they usually have the most-detailed knowledge of their patients’ conditions, they have almost no interaction with or feedback from their patients’ doctors or specialists.
“Most patients, like Yanick, actually want to be at home, they want to be aging in place,” Sterling says. “It’s a shift that we need to make, to start paying attention to home health providers, who are providing essential day-to-day care to patients to help manage their chronic diseases, and really integrate them into the medical arena.”
(Lindsay France/Cornell University)Source: Sterling, Ringel, Cho, Riffin and Avgar, 2022
Unseen contributions
For Yanick’s first appointment with Sterling, Marie came along.
“Marie slipped into the room, carrying both of their jackets, a bag of medications, hospital discharge papers and a notepad,” Sterling and colleagues wrote in a paper guiding clinicians on how to involve home care workers in their patients’ care. “She hurriedly took out a pen and asked, ‘What did I miss?’”
“What struck me the most was how involved and passionate she was about delivering high-quality care to my patient,” Sterling says. “It was really through interactions in the office where I saw just how much she was observing in the home.”
Marie cooks Yanick three healthful meals per day, makes sure she has eaten before taking her daily 20 pills, and does Yanick’s physical therapy with her.
Source: PHI’s Workforce Data Center
“She knew when symptoms changed. She also knew when medications were not helping, or when it was time to go seek care,” Sterling says.
That prompted the Cornell team to launch a series of studies defining the unseen contributions of home care workers, establishing evidence of their value and revealing the lack of equity this workforce experiences, Sterling says.
One of their recent studies, which they conducted through Cornell’s Survey Research Institute, suggests home care workers assist with a far wider scope of care than previously documented. Nearly 74% of New Yorkers surveyed said their caregivers provide medical care and/or emotional support. Those patients were twice as likely to view their caregivers as “very important” compared with those who received only personal care.
When Marie sees Yanick become introverted and sad, she takes action. Yanick frequently get depressed by her physical limitations; until about 10 years ago, she lived an active life. She worked in Brooklyn hospitals as a health care worker and raised three children after emigrating from Haiti at age 16.
“I tell her, ‘We don’t have time for depressed. Let’s take a walk outside,’” Marie says. Sometimes she has Yanick sit on the walker and rolls her outside as if she’s in a wheelchair – that always makes Yanick laugh. “That’s what I want to see,” says Marie, 45, who was also born in Haiti and emigrated to the U.S. at age 23.
Source: PHI’s Workforce Data Center
“She really loves me,” Yanick says. “She’ll say, ‘Come on, smile!’ I feel content with the care. She’s beautiful. She really touched my heart.”
That kind of emotional support has become even more important during the pandemic, when so many vulnerable older people are isolated at home – but it comes at a cost to home care workers. The Cornell team conducted the first study on home care workers’ experiences during the pandemic in the U.S. – and found New York City home care workers faced a higher risk for COVID-19, because many relied on public transportation and frequently lacked protection like masks and gloves. They also faced higher risks to their mental and financial well-being and felt inadequately supported and generally invisible.
The pandemic also exacerbated many of the baseline challenges that home care workers face: low pay, isolation from doctors and other health care providers, physically demanding work, medically challenging patients, unpaid travel time, and frequently changing workplaces that may include unsafe working conditions. “You never know what you’re going to come across. Are you going into a home where there’s hoarding, where there are bedbugs or rodents or crime, broken elevators?” says Faith Wiggins, director of the Home Care Industry Education Fund of the 1199SEIU, the largest health care worker union in the United States, where Marie is a member.
“We really think it’s important to use research to demonstrate the value of the care,” Wiggins says. “With home care, you can’t remote in. You can’t use AI to replace someone assisting you to transfer from your bed into a wheelchair. There will not be a workforce if the wages remain at the bottom, which right now is where they are: minimum wage.”
Ariel Avgar, Ph.D. ’08, professor of labor relations, law and history in the ILR School, is an expert in the area of health care labor relations. (Noël Heaney/Cornell University)
These challenges contribute to a severe shortage of home care workers, while demand from a population that wants to age in place is growing exponentially, says Ariel Avgar, Ph.D. ’08, professor of labor relations, law and history in the ILR School, and an expert in health care labor relations.
“There’s a tendency in the health care industry to view the workforce as a cost – a cost that needs to be minimized,” Avgar says. “In our research we try to demonstrate how this workforce is not just a cost but a central way in which organizations can deliver high-quality care.”
The authors suggest several policies to support home care workers, such as designating them “essential” workers across the U.S., as they are in New York state; legislation to ensure they have masks and gloves; and assigning them to patients on a geographic basis to minimize their need to use public transportation.
“How do we make sure that the knowledge that they have, the insights that they have, make their way into the system in a more robust way?” Avgar says. “It’s happening in some places. But we’re far from where we need to be.”
(Lindsay France/Cornell University)
Real-time assistance
When Marie needs guidance or has a question about Yanick’s care, she’ll try to reach out to various doctors or her home care agency. “Sometimes you call three, four, five times – you get nobody,” she says.
One of the biggest challenges home care workers face is a lack of information about how to handle their patients’ chronic conditions and exacerbated symptoms. The Cornell team is exploring how to use education and technology to address it.
Deborah Estrin, the Robert V. Tishman ’37 Professor and associate dean for impact at Cornell Tech, and professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine, wears an experimental extended reality headset designed for home care workers. (Noël Heaney/Cornell University)
Because the caregivers work in patients’ homes – isolated from doctors, nurses and other home care workers – they can’t learn from others or ask even questions, says Deborah Estrin, the Robert V. Tishman ’37 Professor and associate dean for impact at Cornell Tech, and professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine.
“You don’t have as much chance to see what your colleagues are doing as we do in an office setting or in a hospital setting,” Estrin says.
When home care workers get a new client, they often have no idea what medical conditions they will face. “They often lack the ability to access educational resources on a specific disease that they go into the home with,” Sterling says.
And home care workers want that education.
For example, the team’s research found that when home care workers received training in heart failure – a chronic condition for which they frequently provide care – they had significantly higher job satisfaction compared to those who lacked training.
In June, and as part of Sterling’s Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, the team began the first clinical trial, in partnership with VNS Health, to test whether training home health aides and integrating them into care teams can improve their experience and patient outcomes. Over the next year, 100 home health aides will take a virtual heart failure training course. Half will be able to message their nurse supervisor at their home care agencies via an app when they have questions. The team believes training and communication will improve patient outcomes, such as avoiding 911 calls and trips to the hospital.
(Noël Heaney/Cornell University)
Tech support
When Marie arrives at 8 a.m. each morning, she uses Yanick’s phone to check in with the agency that employs her. “The minute I clock in, they know that I’m here,” she says.
Nicola Dell, associate professor of information science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, specializes in novel computing systems that improve the lives of underserved populations. (Noël Heaney/Cornell University)
Technology for home care workers is rudimentary; community health workers in Kenya and India use far more sophisticated tech in their work, says Nicola Dell, associate professor of information science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. In the U.S., technology for home care workers is designed primarily to track them, she says. “That certainly has connotations of surveillance and indicates a lack of trust in the workforce, rather than what we would like to see and what we propose: tools that will actually support the delivery of care and support their existing tasks and workflows.”
When a home care worker asks an interactive voice assistant a question, the device answers aloud, so patients and family members know the aide is asking about a medical issue. “It’s providing that information they currently either don’t have or are randomly searching for on the internet, and not necessarily knowing the quality of the information that they’re finding,” Dell says. The device can track completed tasks for the incoming aide, document vital signs, provide information on techniques such as how to assess swelling in a patient’s legs, and suggest when a doctor is necessary.
However, the team’s research also shows the technology comes with complex issues of privacy, power and ethics. “Who gets to turn the device on? Who gets to turn it off, and when? “And whose needs and opinions get prioritized in the process?” Dell says. “That’s why we think it’s important to do the research that we’re doing now and explore these issues before these technologies get deployed at scale and cause all kinds of problems.”
Another idea in the works: replacing telehealth visits with “extended reality.”
“One of the things that we began thinking about is, how can we do even better than just that two-dimensional Zoom-like connection between that remote clinical expert and that local caregiver?” Estrin says. The technology could help with crucial tasks from checking an incision after surgery to helping a patient correctly do rehab after a stroke.
Estrin and her students are experimenting with a headset for home care workers that transmits a real-time video of the patient from different angles to a remote doctor who is also wearing a headset. The doctor sees the video of the patient, while the home care worker sees the clinician’s gestures and directions. “The doctor might say, ‘Place the bandage a little broader’ or ‘Try to support their shoulder differently,’” Estrin says. “That helps the caregiver in the moment.”
She and her team simulate those interactions in their Cornell Tech lab – using a mannequin they named “Dave” after one of the lead graduate students on the project – to create demonstration technologies, get feedback from clinicians and home care workers, and improve the design. The technology could be available in three to four years. “That’s exactly the sort of material that Cornell Tech researchers do so well,” she says. “It’s a wonderful back and forth between the present and the future and back again.”
As a land-grant research university, Cornell plays an important role in developing these experimental systems, Estrin says. The commercial marketplace hasn’t done it, because the complexities of U.S. health care make the business model unclear.
Source: PHI’s Workforce Data Center
Although technology can play a major role in supporting patients and the people who care for them, it will never replace the human touch, Estrin says.
“We want the last meter of health to be human. I think most of us, that’s what we would choose,” she says. “That’s what excites me about this technology, because it is about bringing superpowers to those caregivers who are touching, listening to and helping patients and really increasing their horizons for the work that they can do.”
What excites Marie is seeing Yanick open a water bottle on her own, or take a step without assistance.
She knows Yanick is happy too when Yanick wants to dance to Haitian compas music – her favorite. “But you know, to stand longer than two minutes, she can’t,” Marie says. “I say, ‘OK, you want to dance? OK, I’m right behind you.’ Just in case.”
This story and video were developed and produced by Noël Heaney and Susan Kelley, with additional support from Matt Fondeur, Sreang Hok, Wendy Kenigsberg, Eduardo Merchán, Marijke van Niekerk and Charles Amyx. It was edited by Lindsay France and Melanie Lefkowitz.
Dean Greg Morrisett (left) helped convene a group of academics and business leaders at the celebration that included Cornell President Martha E. Pollack, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former Technion President Peretz Lavie.
Dean Greg Morrisett (left) helped convene a group of academics and business leaders at the celebration that included Cornell President Martha E. Pollack, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former Technion President Peretz Lavie.
By Adam Conner-Simons
New York City mayors past and present – Michael Bloomberg and Eric Adams – attended a June 7 celebration of the 10th anniversary of Cornell Tech, the technology and engineering-focused campus that Cornell launched in 2012 with its academic partner, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
The evening program on Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island campus brought together many of the key players who have contributed to its success, including Bloomberg; President Martha E. Pollack; Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech; former president David Skorton; founding Cornell Tech dean Dan Huttenlocher; and former Technion president Peretz Lavie.
Since winning then-Mayor Bloomberg’s global competition, Cornell and Technion’s joint institution has grown from a handful of students located in Google’s Manhattan office to more than 1,500 alumni across eight master’s degrees and seven Ph.D. programs. Through its entrepreneurship programs, Cornell Tech has also spun out more than 80 start-ups that have cumulatively raised more than $150 million in funding.
Adams spoke of the importance of institutions like Cornell Tech in helping New York City’s tech sector blossom, and in inspiring more people to launch companies and create careers here.
“New York City is going to be the center of the cybersecurity, life sciences and blockchain industries,” Adams said. “[Cornell Tech] is an amazing seed that was planted and that’s producing a harvest for all of us.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams spoke at the 10th anniversary celebration about the importance of institutions like Cornell Tech in helping grow the city’s tech sector.
Bloomberg outlined how his administration’s vision for the campus emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 economic downturn. Its success has inspired similar academic collaborations in other cities and states across the country, he said.
“This school shows what is possible when public and private sectors combine strengths and resources,” Bloomberg said. “It’s an investment in the future, and the next generation to come.”
He also thanked Skorton for his key efforts in helping launch the campus, and Pollack for her “outstanding leadership and commitment to Cornell Tech [that] has been critical to the school’s progress.”
Pollack said she was first drawn to Cornell in part because of its ambitious vision to build what she called “a new model of technology education and leadership.” She spoke of the importance of creating new kinds of technology leaders for the future – people with “not only a drive for innovation, but a deep understanding of the intersections between technology, society and humanity.”
Representing Technion, Lavie recalled his early trepidation about the daunting task of launching a new school, remembering that he at one point even phoned Seth Pinsky, then the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, to make sure the proposal wasn’t a joke. He thanked Pinsky, Bloomberg and Bob Steel, Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for economic development, for their work and support in “giving us the unique opportunity to build a revolutionary academic institution from scratch.”
Looking ahead to the next 10 years, Morrisett said Cornell Tech plans to begin the second phase of its growth. He said the campus will ultimately expand from 90 faculty and affiliates to roughly 200 faculty, and from 500 to 2,000 students.
“We are poised to become the premier higher-ed institution for tech in New York and beyond,” Morrisett said. “This is only the beginning.”
Organized in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, the event featured an anniversary video as well as a site-specific performance of “The Freedom to Innovate,” a dance piece developed by Ballet Hispánico that honored the nearby Four Freedoms Park and was a collaboration with Cornell Tech researchers.
Adam Conner-Simons is director of communications for Cornell Tech.
