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Organizations will advance cardiovascular medicine with the use of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, moving towards prediction and prevention of heart disease.

NewYork-Presbyterian, with physicians from its affiliated medical schools Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (Columbia University VP&S), are collaborating with Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Cornell Bowers CIS) to transform cardiovascular health and heart disease prediction and prevention using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

NewYork-Presbyterian will support Cornell with $15 million over three years to fund the initiative aimed to improve heart failure treatment, as well as predict and prevent heart failure. Researchers from Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS will collaborate with physicians from Columbia University VP&S and Weill Cornell Medicine to use AI and machine learning to examine multi-modal data and detect patterns that will help predict who will develop heart failure, inform care decisions and tailor treatments for their patients. The initiative brings together NewYork-Presbyterian, Columbia University VP&S and Weill Cornell Medicine’s technical, clinical and research expertise in cardiovascular medicine with Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS’s leadership in advanced machine learning and AI.

“NewYork-Presbyterian is thrilled to be joining forces with Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS to harness advanced technology and develop insights into the prediction and prevention of heart disease to benefit our patients,” said Dr. Steven J. Corwin, president and chief executive officer of NewYork-Presbyterian. “Together with our world-class physicians from Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia, we can transform the way health care is delivered.”

“Artificial intelligence and technology are changing our society and the way we practice medicine,” said Dr. Nir Uriel, director of advanced heart failure and cardiac transplantation at NewYork-Presbyterian. “We look forward to building a bridge into the future of medicine and using advanced technology to provide tools to enhance care for our heart failure patients,” said Dr. Uriel, who is also a professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and an adjunct professor of medicine in the Greenberg Division of Cardiology at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Researchers and clinicians anticipate the data from a diverse patient population will answer questions around heart failure prediction, diagnosis, prognosis, risk and treatment, and guide physicians as they make decisions around heart transplants and LVADs (pumps for patients who have reached end-stage heart failure). Future research will tackle the task of heart failure and disease prediction to intervene earlier with those most likely to experience heart failure and preempt progression of cardiac conditions and damaging cardiac events.

“Major algorithmic advances are needed to derive precise and reliable clinical insights from complex medical data,” said Deborah Estrin, associate dean for impact at Cornell Tech and a professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. “We are excited about the opportunity to partner with leading cardiologists at NewYork-Presbyterian to advance the state-of-the-art in caring for heart failure and other challenging cardiovascular conditions.”

“AI is poised to fundamentally transform outcomes in cardiovascular health care by providing doctors with better models for diagnosis and risk prediction in heart disease,” said Kavita Bala, professor of computer science and dean of Cornell Bowers CIS. “This unique collaboration between Cornell’s world-leading experts in machine learning and AI and outstanding cardiologists and clinicians from NewYork-Presbyterian, Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia will drive this next wave of innovation for long-lasting impact on cardiovascular health care.”

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Open Studio, Recognition, research, and more!

NEW YORK, NY – The 2022 spring semester has been quite a busy time for Cornell Tech. Indeed, this academic year represented our campus’ 10th anniversary — marking a full decade since Cornell University and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology were selected as the winners of the City of New York’s global competition to build an engineering campus on Roosevelt Island.

In just 10 years, Cornell Tech has gone from an on-paper concept to a living, breathing, fast-growing institution. We have graduated over 1,500 alumni, launched more than 80 startups employing roughly 400 employees, and helped to improve the NYC community through initiatives like Break Through Tech, K-12, Public Interest Tech (PiTech), and Runway, as well as through the groundbreaking research our students and faculty publish.

Here are some of the highlights from the spring semester…

The Urban Tech Hub’s Rebooting NYC report

The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute’s Urban Tech Hub released its final Rebooting NYC report at the end of January. The report contains suggestions for the city’s new administration to consider when it comes to tackling some of NYC’s biggest challenges. The suggestions were broken into five broad categories:

  • Foundations: Privacy and administration
  • Technology equity: Include everyone in the digital economy
  • Optimized systems: Use technology to improve the management of our built environment
  • Always open: Make it easier to engage with the city
  • Futureproofing: Position NYC to shape the urban technology of the future

Rebooting NYC presentation at School of Data 2022

Break Through Tech’s new AI initiative

Break Through Tech, an initiative to increase the number of women and underrepresented communities holding technology degrees and careers, launched Break Through Tech AI this April. The program’s goal is to help students gain the skills they need to work in the data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence spaces specifically.

“We are incredibly proud of our Break Through Tech initiative and its crucial impact in closing the inexcusable gender and diversity gap in tech today,” said Dean Greg Morrisett. “Tackling the artificial intelligence sector in tech is crucial for creating equitable products, economies, and policy, and we’re excited to support the massive contribution Break Through Tech AI will have on both academia and industry.”

a Break Through Tech student using the computer

Security efforts to prevent tech abuse

Survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) often have trouble getting the long-term support they need. Akin to healthcare, researchers from Cornell Tech’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse (CETA) created a new approach to provide survivors of tech-enabled abuse with “continuity of care.” The paper, “Care Infrastructure for Digital Security in Intimate Partner Violence,” won Best Paper at the 2022 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Chart indicating continuity of care

arXiv’s 2 million submissions

Stewarded by Cornell Tech, the free open-access scholarly archive arXiv.org passed the milestone of two million hosted articles this January.

“These two million submissions represent two million opportunities for humanity to push forward the frontiers of our understanding,” said Tara Holm, professor of mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences and arXiv advisory board member.

arXiv submissions graph

$500,000 given out at the 2022 Startup Awards

Cornell Tech held its first in-person Open Studio event since spring 2019, which includes a special alumni panel commemorating our 10th anniversary as an institution. The 2022 Startup Award Winners were:

  • Kaveat, which helps people understand their contracts by translating the legal jargon into simple plain English
  • Abstractive Health, which helps doctors read and write clinical notes faster with an automated summary
  • Canary Privacy, which helps businesses test, monitor, and fix privacy issues on their websites and apps to protect user data and ensure compliance
  • Nobul, which empowers patients to take control over their medical care by providing patients tools to understand their medical bills, as well as identify and resolve errors
  • MyLÚA Health, a digital maternal care platform that predicts risk of pregnancy complications via a patient app and clinician dashboard; thereby reducing mortality and ensuring equitable outcomes

MyLÚA Health won a special new award, the Siegel Family Endowment PiTech Startup Award, which is for the startup that is creating the most positive societal impact with their efforts.

Kaveat, Abstractive Health, Canary Privacy, Nobul, and MyLÚA Health logos

Tools to make the NFT art market work better for creators

In the past year, there’s been a huge boom in the art world when it comes to the market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). With it, there’s also been a massive growth in the number of NFT-buying bots that make this revenue model less valuable for creators.

But this year a new tool was developed by Cornell Tech researchers that aims to help reduce the impact of bots in NFT auctions, by systematically enforcing a one-NFT-per-person policy.

A picture frame with a collage photos NFT art on white wall

Analyzing YouTube demonetization

In recent years, YouTube has focused their safety policies on demonetizing creators that participate in off-platform behaviors or create content that may be considered harmful, even if they do not explicitly violate the platform’s rules.

However, a team from Cornell Tech reviewed 71 million videos on YouTube that were published by more than 136,000 popular content creators with more than 10,000 subscribers to understand how creators, including channels that distribute problematic content, employ alternative monetization strategies that could allow them to circumvent the effects of any “demonetization” by YouTube.

The research was covered by Protocol, The Verge, Fast Company, Engadget, and more.

Youtube paper logo lies with envelope full of dollar bills and smartphone

Dean Morrisett backing the U.S. Innovation & Competition Act of 2021

Dean Greg Morrisett joined Senator Chuck Schumer in early April to offer his support for a new act that would invest $110 billion into science and technology research.

Among other provisions, the bill establishes a Directorate for Technology and Innovation in the National Science Foundation and includes initiatives related to elementary and secondary schools to increase computer science education programs.

Dean Morrisett and Senator Schumer

Closing out the academic year with Recognition

This year, Cornell Tech recognized 346 accomplished graduates in the Class of 2022 — the school’s largest class to date!

“Seeing you, another community of people building something different, is wildly uplifting; a new generation of people attuned to technology and the common good,” said Recognition Ceremony keynote speaker Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Corporation. “I am so moved and buoyed by the choice you made to come here, and by what you will do as you go forward.”

2022 also brought about our first 14 graduates to have received Jacobs Technion-Cornell Dual MS Degrees with a Concentration in Urban Tech.

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This week Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School announced a new $100,000 renewable grant bestowed by hospitality entrepreneurs Bob Diener JD ’82 and David Litman ’AB 79 JD ’82, who co-founded hotels.com together in 1991.

The grant will be used to support engagement with Israeli law students for Cornell’s unique Tech LLM program, which provides specialty training in law, technology and entrepreneurship while placing students side by side with business, computer science, and engineering students to solve real-world product design and development problems.

“We’re excited to support a program that is at the cutting edge of technology law, and that aims to prepare lawyers for the intricacies of working within a constantly-changing tech ecosystem,” says Diener.

The LLM selects top candidates with an interest in technology and one or more years of practice experience. As the program looks to grow, grants like the Diener/Litman award are critical to recruiting and retaining the very best candidates.

“We hope that this grant will continue to deepen Cornell Tech’s engagement with Israel and that these Israeli students will, in turn, enhance Cornell Tech’s strong reputation,” says Litman.

Litman and Diener have achieved success in multiple segments of the travel sector.  They founded hotels.com after creating a multimillion dollar wholesale airfare consolidation operation. They sold hotels.com in 2004 in a deal that valued the company at roughly $5.5 billion.

The duo has since founded getaroom.com, a business-to-business hotel-room distributor, which itself was acquired this past month by Booking Holdings for $1.2 billion and will be rolled into the company’s Priceline brand.

“Given our close partnership with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, we’re very grateful that a business dream team like Bob and David is excited about our mission and willing to support our efforts to attract more Israeli students to Cornell Tech,” says LLM program director Matt D’Amore.

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Today Cornell Tech’s Break Through Tech initiative announced that has partnered with Gender Equality in Tech (GET) Cities and SecondMuse Foundation to launch a third city hub in Miami as part of Pivotal Ventures’ $50 million investment to propel more women, trans and nonbinary people – and particularly Black, Latino/a, Indigenous, and people of color – into tech education, careers, and leadership.

With many global tech giants, startups and investors having already begun to establish a presence in the South Florida city, and with the widespread embrace of remote work, Miami – an area built on its diversity – is primed for tech expansion. This new attention creates a perfect opportunity to capture the commitment to proactively building one of the most diverse and inclusive tech hubs in the country with existing, local talent, and to pouring energy and resources toward that goal. Over a year and a half into the COVID-19 era, we are seeing with a clearer lens the gross inequities across gender, race, and other underrepresented identities in society. Tech is an industry that has the scale to match the need for accessible economic empowerment that can and should be available to all of us. And GET Cities believes Miami is an ideal city to accelerate the inclusion of women and other marginalized groups in building these new, thriving, sustainable tech economies.

GET Miami will build on the model presented in its other GET Cities, GET Chicago and GET DC, to create an inclusive tech economy by focusing on three key pillars – academia, industry, and entrepreneurship. Specifically, it aims to build resilient pathways into tech and propel women at Miami’s Florida International University into tech careers through programs that encourage and incentivize more women to pursue computing degrees. It will support these women along their educational journey by providing real-world experiences and a network of supportive professionals and peers.

Break Through Tech will bring together the supply side (academia) and the demand side (industry) to build an ecosystem where more women are graduating with relevant degrees today and finding an inclusive career environment waiting for them for years to come. With over 650 students graduating with degrees in computing, and with 75 percent of all women in computing being Black, Latina, or Indigenous, the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences is one of the largest growing computing programs in the country with one of the most diverse student populations and provides the opportunity to exponentially grow the number of diverse women in computing.

FIU is well-poised to introduce hundreds of women at FIU and surrounding community colleges to Break Through Tech’s Guild Program, expose the local tech employers to hundreds of talented female prospective hires through the Sprinternship Program, as well as innovate on Break Through Tech’s model to accelerate the pace of change to recruit and retain more women in computing. Building upon the crucial investment of the Knight Foundation and other efforts, FIU will utilize Break Through Tech’s model and join a national network of like-minded universities to provide new opportunities for their students and contribute to a growing body of knowledge about how to drive gender equality in tech at scale. Break Through Tech Miami at FIU is ambitious in their goals of diversifying the tech sector and, in the words of FIU President Mark Rosenberg, is committed to “turning the impossible into the inevitable.”

“As we continue to expand our national footprint, we are thrilled to bring Break Through Tech’s innovative programming to FIU. Together we will help make real the promise of Miami as one of the nation’s most diverse and thriving tech ecosystems. The future of innovation depends on all of us, and our partnership with FIU will help fuel a future in which women are technology creators and not just consumers,” says Judith Spitz, Founder and Executive Director at Break Through Tech.

GET Cities Miami will kick off with a launch event in early 2022, with the purpose of co-designing a local approach in partnership with the community. A key theme of the event will be to highlight opportunities for local students, talent, entrepreneurs and employers as GET Cities launches new initiatives. An example of GET Cities’ programming is the #GETChicago Tech Equity Working Group, a consortium of piloted projects across 20 entrepreneur support organizations to increase equity in start-up investment for women and other underrepresented founders. Attendees will also have the opportunity to join the conversation as GET Cities designs its fellowships, micro internships, and grants programs to be tailored to the specific needs of the Miami tech ecosystem over the next few years.

About Break Through Tech

Launched at Cornell Tech, with support from Pivotal Ventures, Cognizant Foundation, and Verizon, Break Through Tech provides curriculum innovation, career access, and community building for women in tech. The program originated in 2016 as a program called Women in Technology & Entrepreneurship New York (WiTNY), created at Cornell Tech in partnership with the City University of New York (CUNY) and a broad set of industry partners. Now Break Through Tech is replicating the highly effective ecosystem model originated in New York City to increase women’s representation in computing graduates across the United States. To date, the program is in New York City, Chicago, the DC Metro Area, and now Miami.

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This week we sat down for an interview with Eswar Prasad, the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy at Cornell University.  Last month he published his new book, “The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance”.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions about digital currencies?

The term digital currency now has become much broader, it includes not just cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin that have an unstable value, but also new types of cryptocurrency called stablecoins. Stablecoins maintain stable values, as the name suggests, because they are backed up by stores of fiat currency, such as the US dollar. A stable coin linked to the US dollar will have stable value because it is backed up by a reserve of US dollars. There are other types of cryptocurrencies that are trying to fix Bitcoin’s weakness. There are some currencies that provide greater anonymity or are more efficient to use than Bitcoin.

What are some things that central banks should consider when they are regulating and managing risks with digital currencies?

Low cost digital payments are not easily accessible to parts of the population, especially in many low income and developing countries. Even in a country like the US, which is a very advanced rich economy. Even here, about 5% of the adult population is believed to be unbanked or under bank. That is, they don’t have easy access to bank accounts or credit or debit cards. If you think about using a digital payment method on your phone, such as Apple Pay, which is quite easy to use. The problem is that you need to have Apple Pay linked up to a credit card or to a bank account and if you don’t have either of those to start with, you do not have easy access to digital payments. Now, cryptocurrencies are supposed to provide better payments.

Given the potential benefits that could be accrued from cryptocurrency technology, even if not from cryptocurrencies, themselves, I’m hopeful that we will find a middle path where the government is able to accrue the benefits of this innovation without squelching them completely. While ensuring that there is adequate investor protection and financial stability risk mitigation in place.

Are there innovative opportunities for how we use digital currencies that we cannot currently do with traditional currencies?

Digital payments are a lot more efficient and can generate real gains for businesses and consumers. It’s not just domestic payments, if you think about international payments, they are very expensive, slow, cumbersome, and difficult to track in real time. If you think about exporters and importers who are conducting trade with other countries, economic migrants sending remittances back to their home countries, they face a lot of barriers, in terms of making those international payments. The technology underlying cryptocurrencies has the potential to make those digital payments much more efficient, cheaper, and opens up the possibility of tracking them in real time.

Decentralized finance, in my view, has a lot of potential for the provision of easy access of not just digital payments, but also basic banking products and services, such as instruments for savings, for credit, for insurance, and to make those products easily accessible to the masses, even people who might not have access to a bank account or a formal financial institution that they have an account with. There are opportunities for increasing the inclusiveness of the financial system through these new technologies.

What should governments and users consider when it comes to privacy and security with digital currencies?

There is a trade off here. From the point of view of a government, it wants to make sure that any currency it or the National Central Bank issues is not used to finance, illicit or nefarious activities of any sort. That requires auditability and traceability of transactions, and when you have auditability, and traceability, that is going to make it much harder to maintain confidentiality of financial transactions. There is going to have to be a balance struck between these competing objectives. We would all presumably like to have as much privacy in our financial lives as possible, but the government wants to make sure that certain types of activities are constrained, especially when it comes to the use of its own money. We’re going to need to have conversations about this, not just in terms of the economic or technical issues involved, but at a societal level about the trade offs that we’re going to be facing.

How do you collaborate with researchers at Cornell Tech on this topic?

Cornell Tech has been crucial to the writing of this book. There are many colleagues, especially in the IC 3d initiative for cryptocurrencies, who’ve been extraordinarily helpful in guiding me through some of the technical aspects of cryptocurrencies and about many of the technologies that underpin them and are also being created right now. Much of this decentralized finance architecture that I spoke about, is in fact being developed by some of the leading researchers at Cornell Tech.

There were a number of collaborations that I’ve had, and continue to have with colleagues at Cornell Tech, in terms of some of the technical issues related to Central Bank digital currencies, but also about how to think through issues related to regulation. The existence of Cornell Tech, and the fact that I have so many colleagues there that are the frontiers of research on these issues has been tremendously valuable to the book, and it’s in many ways shaped certain chapters in the book in important ways.

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“Horizon Scan” forecasts urban technology trends over the next decade

250+ breakthroughs, innovations, and applications outlined in interactive resource

Today a team from Cornell Tech released the “Horizon Scan,” which synthesizes more than 250 urban tech breakthroughs, innovations, and applications, as well as the field’s potential and risks over the next decade. The Horizon Scan is the most comprehensive survey to date of the emerging field of urban tech covering infrastructure, resiliency, machine learning, and equity, among other issues. Here is the full report.

“This research project is a testament to our belief that the future of technology is the future of cities,” said Michael Samuelian, Founding Director of the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech. “By focusing our gaze on the future, we can make better-informed decisions on the increasing challenges that today’s cities face every day.”

The project was led by Dr. Anthony Townsend, who is the inaugural Urbanist in Residence at the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech. Townsend, the author of two books and numerous technology forecasts on topics including smart cities, automated mobility, and last-mile delivery, sees the report as a founding document for the field.

“The Horizon Scan is meant to create a conversation across the many areas that are a part of urban tech,” said Townsend. “The report describes the innovations that the field could produce in the coming decade. But it also lays out the ‘technical debt’ that’s already on the books due to hasty decisions about sensing, AI, and tech governance. The hope is that this roadmap helps the field come together to make better decisions about applied research going forward.”

The Cornell Tech report covers a variety of technological advances—from autonomous vehicles and facial recognition to carbon sinks and urban sensing—that are poised to transform our cities over the next ten years. The years-long research effort produced six narrative forecasts that summarize the most important shifts likely to shape the future of cities nationally and globally.

  1. Supercharged Infrastructure: Urban systems converge into a deep, actionable web
    The smart cities movement aims to equip buildings and infrastructure with digital sensing, and engineers have deployed these technologies to control individual systems. But smart buildings and infrastructure aren’t yet linked up at an urban city scale.
    UPSHOT: Over the next decade, the convergence of physical and digital infrastructure will speed up, enabling us to track the flow of energy, water, and waste in real-time. Cities will play a catalytic role in orchestrating this process. But the bigger challenge will be harnessing the power of this vast, deep, actionable web.
  2. Wild & Well:  Life science transforms urban systems
    The lockdowns of 2020 revealed a powerful desire to reconnect with nature in urban public spaces. At the same time, advances in surveying the natural world are making it newly possible to assess the way environmental health is linked to our own at the microscopic scale.
    UPSHOT: Researchers are mapping microbiomes within urban transit systems and sampling sewage to detect COVID-19 outbreaks. Municipal governments are wiring up waterways to calculate the vitality of ecosystems. Arrays of citizen-operated sensors are collecting climate data.
  3. Resilient Corridors: Scaling sustainable building technology
    Over the next decade, many cities will launch climate “moonshots” to cut carbon emissions and weather the shocks of climate change. To maximize impact, leaders should concentrate political and financial capital alongside concentrations of networked infrastructure, where technology will amplify the advantages of density.
    UPSHOT: Streets will take on new roles as cities seek to extract maximum value from the public realm. Remote work, learning, and healthcare will drive changes in the kinds of buildings we need; novel materials and automated construction techniques will transform how we build them.
  4. Dark Plans: Urban chaos gives way to an algorithmic hum
    Artificial neural networks that power machine learning are creating tremendous value in our cities by revealing order in the movements of people, goods, resources, and information. They can help us organize our urban world with a predictive capability unrivaled in human history.
    UPSHOT: There’s no telling what society will gain and which individual freedoms we will lose to create a more connected, orderly system.
  5. New Screen Deal: Inclusive urban innovations challenge surveillance capitalism
    Equity goals are becoming as important as the efficiency aspirations that have long driven smart-city agendas. As tech becomes the vehicle and catalyst for transforming society’s most prized and vital institutions, a new sociotechnical compact is emerging.
    UPSHOT: Networks that empower the disempowered should be fostered, while those that extend the reach and consolidate the control of the most powerful must be checked.
  6. Urban Innovation Industrializes: Big business cracks the code of the city
    The tension between proprietary and open-source tech has been a constant in the smart cities movement, creating suspicion of corporate smart-city solutions and blocking implementation of large-scale private digital projects. But in the decade ahead, big tech will crack the code of the city.
    UPSHOT: As a new urban innovation industry takes shape, big financial and political interests will move in. Much of the decisive action will play out within the high-stakes context of Sino-American geopolitical jockeying.

 

About Cornell Tech
Cornell Tech is Cornell University’s groundbreaking campus for technology research and education on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Our faculty, students, and industry partners work together in an ultra-collaborative environment, pushing inquiry further and developing meaningful technologies for a digital society. Founded in partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the City of New York, Cornell Tech achieves global reach and local impact, extending Cornell University’s long history of leading innovation in computer science and engineering.

 

About Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute
The Jacobs Institute fosters radical experimentation at the intersection of research, education, and entrepreneurship. Established jointly by Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, our mission is to transform key industries through technological innovation, deep-tech startups, and uniquely skilled talent.

The Jacobs Institute degree programs equip students to take on complex, real-world challenges through interdisciplinary, domain-focused work. Recent PhD graduates work through the Jacobs Runway Startup Postdoctoral Program to apply their knowledge as they lead teams and build companies in industries critical to the 21st century.

 

About the Urban Tech Hub

The Urban Tech Hub of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech is a center of activity that generates applied research, fosters an expanding tech ecosystem, and cultivates the next generation of leaders in urban technology. Our goal is to shape the field of urban tech with a human-centered approach that focuses first on the people that use the technology. We advance technology research and education to build a better world by increasing access and opportunity within the tech sector.

The Jacobs Urban Tech Hub leverages the resources of Cornell University (and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology) to bring together researchers, engineers, scientists, urban tech companies, government agencies, and community organizations to address the challenges facing cities today.

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Today the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech, in partnership with Google for Startups and industry nonprofit Tech:NYC, announced the launch of the “NYC Recovery Challenge.” The challenge will bring together startup entrepreneurs from across the five boroughs to pitch tech solutions for New York’s recovery to a panel of business, economic, and policy experts with the chance of winning cash prizes, technical mentorship, and more.

The top three founders and their teams will be recognized as “NYC Recovery Fellows” and will receive cash awards from a prize fund totaling $150,000. The first-place founder and their team will receive a non-dilutive cash award of $100,000, and two runners-up will each receive non-dilutive cash awards of $25,000. Seven other entrants will be recognized as “Founders to Watch” and will participate, along with the three cash award recipients, in a month-long, equity-free mentorship program led by Cornell Tech, Google for Startups, and Tech:NYC advisers.

“The pandemic has given us a once in a lifetime opportunity to reimagine how our city works,” said Michael Samuelian, Founding Director of the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub. “Cornell Tech’s mission is to build a deep bench of NYC-based tech talent, so today we are calling on our homegrown innovators to demonstrate the resilience and ingenuity of New Yorkers, break some eggs, and tell us how to make their block, borough, and city better through tech.”

The challenge is open to any New York City-based startups currently in the pre-seed and seed funding stages that have not yet raised over $5 million. Competitive applicants will showcase how their startup specifically can assist New York’s economic recovery and foster job creation. Founders from underrepresented backgrounds reflecting the diversity of New York City are especially encouraged to apply.

“New York’s tech sector has stood by our city throughout the pandemic, from manufacturing ventilators and PPE to building vaccine and testing websites,” said Julie Samuels, Executive Director of Tech:NYC. “This challenge is another example of tech’s continued commitment to New York and its future. Thank you to Cornell Tech and Google for Startups for making this happen, and to the chambers, the NYCEDC, and the NYCETC for lending support. We are all very excited to see what our local entrepreneurs come up with.”

“New York City has a long track record of resilience and continues to attract and develop some of the world’s most promising tech talent,” said Jason Leder, Head of VC and Startups Partnerships at Google. “With help from Cornell Tech, Tech:NYC, and many local business and political leaders, we are proud to provide the next generation of New York innovators with resources and guidance to advance their business and make a lasting impact on their city.”

A Community Advisory Panel of business and government leaders has been appointed to assist selecting award recipients and to provide insights on the economic and workforce development challenges facing the city. Members will include:

  • Jessica Walker, President & CEO, Manhattan Chamber of Commerce
  • Randy Peers, President & CEO, Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce
  • Thomas Grech, President & CEO, Queens Chamber of Commerce
  • Linda Baran, President & CEO, Staten Island Chamber of Commerce
  • Lisa Sorin, President & CEO, Bronx Chamber of Commerce
  • Karen Bhatia, Senior Vice President, NYC Economic Development Corporation
  • Sander Dolder, Senior Vice President, NYC Economic Development Corporation
  • Jose Ortiz, Jr., President & CEO, NYC Employment and Training Coalition
  • Eustacio (Andy) Saldaña, Executive Director, NY Tech Alliance

 

To apply and learn more, founders can visit the challenge’s website. Applications will be accepted until October 29, 2021 at 11:59 PM ET. Application results will be shared on November 29, 2021, and the mentorship program for the ten recognized founders and their teams will start in December.

 

ABOUT THE CORNELL TECH URBAN TECH HUB

The Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech addresses pressing urban challenges and discovers new ways that digital technology can drive solutions and engage thought-leaders and communities to realize the positive impact of urban technologies. The Hub is a center of activity and experimentation that bridges the gap between academic resources and public needs. At Cornell, the Urban Tech Hub has a threefold mandate; to undertake applied research on urban challenges, to leverage the convening power of a university campus to bring people together and to educate the next generation of home-grown NYC tech talent.

ABOUT GOOGLE FOR STARTUPS

Google for Startups is on a mission to to level the playing field for startup success by bringing founders the best of Google’s products, connections, and best practices. Paired with a deep commitment to create diverse startup communities, many Google for Startups offerings are designed specifically to provide underrepresented founders with access to resources and opportunities.

ABOUT TECH:NYC

Tech:NYC is an engaged network of tech leaders working to foster a dynamic, diverse, and creative New York. It brings together New Yorkers to support a successful technology ecosystem, attract and retain top-tier talent, and celebrate New York and the companies that call it home. Tech:NYC mobilizes the expertise and resources of the tech sector to work with city and state government on policies that ensure New York’s innovation economy thrives.

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Mitigating abuses of encrypted social media communication, on outlets such as WhatsApp and Signal, while ensuring user privacy is a massive challenge on a range of fronts, including technological, legal and social.

A five-year, $3 million National Science Foundation grant to a multidisciplinary team of Cornell researchers aims to take early but significant steps on that arduous journey toward safe, secure online communication.

Thomas Ristenpart, associate professor of computer science at the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and at Cornell Tech, is principal investigator (PI) of the project, “Privacy-Preserving Abuse Prevention for Encrypted Communications Platforms.”

“This is a charged topic area, because of the fears that these types of abuse mitigations will come at the cost of degrading privacy guarantees,” Ristenpart said. “So the real trick is trying to preserve privacy in a meaningful way, while still empowering and enabling users to be more protected from these kinds of abuse.”

Co-PI’s are Mor Naaman, professor of information science at Cornell Bowers CIS and at Cornell Tech; James Grimmelmann, the Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Tech and at Cornell Law School; J. Nathan Matias, assistant professor of communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; and Amy Zhang, assistant professor in the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

“This problem needs an approach that goes well beyond just the technical aspects,” Naaman said. “In putting our team together, we aimed to get broad coverage – anything from the design of the systems, understanding their use by different communities, legal frameworks that can enable innovation in this space, and questions about the social norms and expectations around these areas.”

The team has been working on this challenge for some time; in fact, a new paper just released on arXiv, “Increasing Adversarial Uncertainty to Scale Private Similarity Testing,” addresses the challenge of enabling privacy-preserving client-side warnings of potential abuse in encrypted communication. First author Yiqing Hua, a doctoral student in the field of computer science at Cornell Tech, will present the work next summer at USENIX Security 2022.

Ristenpart, whose research spans a wide range of computer security topics, said abuse mitigation in encrypted messaging is a wide-open field.

“For the most part, the protections are pretty rudimentary in this space,” he said. “And part of that is due to kind of fundamental tensions that arise because you’re trying to provide strong privacy guarantees … while working to build out these (abuse mitigation) features.”

The NSF-funded research is organized around two overlapping approaches: algorithmic-driven and community-driven.

The former will focus on developing better cryptographic tools for privacy-aware abuse detection in encrypted settings, such as detection of viral, fast-spreading content. These designs will be informed by a human-centered approach to understanding people’s privacy expectations, and supported by legal analyses that ensure tools are consistent with applicable privacy and content-moderation laws.

The latter will focus on giving online communities the tools they need to address abuse challenges in encrypted settings. Given the challenges and pitfalls of centralized approaches for abuse mitigation, the project will explore building distributed moderation capabilities to support communities and groups on these platforms.

The new paper, of which Ristenpart and Naaman are co-authors, addresses the algorithm side of abuse mitigation with a prototype concept, called “similarity-based bucketization,” or SBB. A client reveals a small amount of information to a database-holding server so that it can generate a “bucket” of potentially similar items.

“This bucket,” Hua said, “would be small enough for efficient computation, but big enough to provide ambiguity so the server doesn’t know exactly what the image is, protecting the privacy of the user.”

The key to SBB, as with all secure encryption: striking the correct balance of obtaining enough information to detect possible abuses while preserving user privacy.

Ristenpart said questions regarding usability and implementation of SBB will be addressed in future research, but this work has given his group a running start into the five-year grant work on tech companies’ detection of abuses.

“There are a lot of usability questions,” Ristenpart said. “We don’t really understand how users react to information on these private channels already, let alone when we do interventions, such as warning people about disinformation. So there are a lot of questions, but we’re excited to work on it.”

Funding for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation.

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Facade of the Cornell Tech campus

Cornell Tech’s Public Interest Tech initiative (PiTech) just launched a new Visiting Practitioners program (ViP), in which Cornell Tech students and faculty will glean insights and build relationships with tech leaders from a range of impact-oriented organizations.

ViPs will engage with community members in multiple ways throughout the semester, giving talks, offering office hours, and providing feedback on product and business ideas.

“We’re excited to launch this new program, which will help our growing PiTech community to learn from experienced practitioners in the field,” says professor Deborah Estrin.

Lyel Resner, Head of PiTech Studio, says the initiative’s goal is to foster a new generation of innovators, leaders, and thinkers focused on guiding technology toward positive societal outcomes.

The inaugural cohort of ViPs for the fall 2021 semester include:

  • Rhonda Allen, CEO, dev/color
  • Anjana Rajan, CTO, Polaris
  • Oscar Romero, Program Director, NYC’s Mayor’s Office of the CTO
  • Roxann Stafford, Managing Director, Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund

PiTech is supported by a seed investment from The Atlantic Philanthropies.

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This summer Cornell Tech worked on a new collaboration with the New York Choreographic Institute, in which dancers from New York City Ballet performed site-specific ballet pieces all over campus, including along the majestic Manhattan skyline views on the top floors of several of academic buildings. (More about the making of the videos is available on the NYCB website.)

It’s part of efforts from Cornell Tech’s Digital Life Initiative to do more in the way of collaborating with artists and performers to merge technology with art. The project was coordinated by Cornell Tech research fellow Michael Byrne alongside Adrian Danchig-Waring, Artistic Director of the New York Choreographic Institute.

“yoyo”

choreographed by Sophie Laplane of the Scottish Ballet
Filmed at Tata Innovation Center (designed by Weiss/Manfredi Architecture)

“Outside In”

choreographed by Alysa Pires of the National Ballet of Canada

< Back to News

Media Highlights

Bloomberg Law

Ripple Ruling Blurs Definition of Cryptocurrencies as Securities

Mental Daily

Study Takes A Closer Look At NYPD Patrol Patterns Using Dashcam Footage

Tech Policy Press

Content Moderation, Encryption, and the Law

Princeton University

Tech Expert Arvind Narayanan Takes the Helm at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Marktechpost

A New AI Research from Stanford, Cornell, and Oxford Introduces a Generative Model that Discovers Object Intrinsics from Just a Few Instances in a Single Image

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