5 Things Built at Cornell Tech This Year

Cornell Tech students, postdocs and staff are constantly building and innovating whether it’s in the classroom, at work and even during summer break.

Here are 5 things built at Cornell Tech and demonstrated during Open Studio, our end-of-semester celebration of student, faculty and staff projects:

1) RoboTC
Developed by Wilson Pulling, MEng ‘16, RoboTC makes it easier for makers to build robots. Pulling compares the difficulty of building robots today to developing software years ago and wants to make building robots as easy as building an app. RoboTC is a chip which attaches to any robot and allows makers to download functionalities from an “algorithm store” instead of coding them from scratch.

This enables easy implementation of otherwise difficult tasks such as path planning and object recognition, which Pulling hopes will drastically expand the scope of maker projects and help them to make the leap from robotics tinkerers to robotics entrepreneurs.

2) Spider Eyes
Connective Media student Joanna Zhang ‘16 built an application called Spider Eyes over her summer break. The program crawls Wikipedia and visualizes all the connected Wikipedia articles and their relationship with the searched term. The size of each node on the web of related pages shows the importance of that page to the search.

3) Facepage
As part of her Connective Media specialization project, Zhang is building Facepage. The software generates a timeline of news for a searched term or topic. For example, a search of Barack Obama would return thousands of news articles. Facepage gathers the information, summarizes it and presents it to users in a easy-to-comprehend timeline.

4) Slice
Jai Chaudhary, developer in residence and MEng ‘15, has built a semantic search system currently being used by radiologists at Weill Cornell Medical College. It searches patient records with more precision than previous systems. What separates Slice from a normal keyword search is its ability to filter out terms in negative context. For example, if a radiologist searches for patients with cancer on other platforms, results for ‘no cancer’ would show up as well. Slice allows for positive searches, saving radiologists valuable time sorting through records.

Slice is currently being used by about 36 radiologists at Weill and has helped them compile 5,000 reports in just 2 months. The long term vision for Slice is to further understand contextual meaning of terms and combine it with radiologist search intent.

Demo

5) City Hive
City Hive is a mobile first e-commerce platform developed by Runway Startup Postdoc Roi Kliper and his team. The platform allows for buy buttons and calls to action to be seamlessly integrated within the content being viewed on webpages, apps and other digital media. City Hive is currently being used by multiple customers and is shifting the power equilibrium of commerce online.