As Cornell Tech celebrates its 10th year, the school has become a global hub for tech innovation. Over the past decade, Cornell Tech has helped make NYC the second most valuable startup ecosystem in the world, after Silicon Valley.

I think the best part of Cornell was knowing that whatever I was interested in working on, I would have the support of a professor who would offer mentorship and guidance.”

— Irene Font Peradejordi MS ’21, user researcher at Twitter

Cornell Tech opened its campus on Roosevelt Island just five years ago, with 30 faculty and 300 graduate students. Since then, Cornell Tech has been redefining the notion of collaboration in graduate education — working hand-in-hand with industry partners to solve real-world problems. Its programs have attracted visionary thinkers who are attracted by the opportunity to work with people in programs that blend technical expertise, business knowhow, and a creative mindset.

From agriculture to AI to healthcare, Cornell Tech alumni are driving social change. To showcase a few of the creative ways alumni are using their Cornell Tech degree, we reached out to three recent graduates:

• Shreyas Kulkarni MS ’17, head of product for the mental health app Mine’d
• Irene Font Peradejordi MS ’21, user researcher at the Twitter META team
• Leanna Mulvihill MS ’20, product manager for the national food delivery app Rosie

These three all earned the same degree — Master of Science in Applied Information Science (Technion) & Master of Science Information Systems (Cornell) with a Concentration in Connective Media — but they have taken very different directions. We hope you enjoy their stories.

Shreyas Kulkarni MS ’17: it knew my name

Shreyas Kulkarni clearly remembers the first time he interacted with a computer. He was in the 7th grade, watching his Uncle Krishna learning how to code using the program “Hello World!” His uncle programmed the computer to say the phrase, “Hello Shreyas!” Shreyas recalls the thrill he felt thinking that the computer recognized him and knew his name. He was smitten.

Shreyas enrolled in classes at the only computing center in his hometown of Karkala, India, where the instructor took him under his wing. He practiced coding on his father’s computer and soon wrote his first program. At age 19, Shreyas launched his first startup, helping cashew producers in his region create an online presence to enhance their domestic and international sales.

After earning his undergraduate degree in software development, Shreyas went to work for the multinational bank, J.P. Morgan. “After ten months, I knew this wasn’t for me,” he says. “I always wanted to do something of my own.”

When a friend applied to Cornell Tech, Shreyas did some research into the new school and, once again, he was smitten. “With my love for entrepreneurship, I jumped on this,” he says.

For his Cornell Tech thesis, Shreyas created a collaborative filtering algorithm similar to the one Netflix uses to predict which movies a subscriber might enjoy based on their viewing history. He managed to create this algorithm on the user’s personal device, as opposed to using a central server, with 75-80% accuracy.

After graduating in 2017, Shreyas worked for Google for the next four years. Then, in March 2020, the pandemic hit. “COVID was a point of introspection for me,” he says. “I knew that money was the reason I was at Google and that there were many others like me — recent graduates whose student loans were a big factor in the choices we made. We weren’t getting the opportunity to do the things we were passionate about.”

We think of this as self-help, as taking some time to focus just on yourself.”

— Shreyas Kulkarni MS ’17

Shreyas recognized that mental health issues were prevalent among his peers, but that there was a stigma around acknowledging these issues. “It was not ok to talk about this,” he says. “I realized there was a big gap in our marketplace, and that we needed to prioritize and make emotional wellness fun.”

He teamed up with Mine’d to provide technical expertise to make the app work similar to other social media. “Our premise is not to take you away from your day to day to focus on mental wellness, but rather to build a product that that seamlessly integrates into your life,” he explains.

Mine’d users tune in to live sessions or take advantage of the app’s extensive video library to receive coaching in everything from setting workplace boundaries to handling challenges with money, relationships, or family members.

The app utilizes a panel of expert coaches, who are empathetic, relatable, and know how to talk about emotional issues.

Unlike Netflix preferences, a person’s mental health journey is highly individualized. “You really can’t bucket people,” Shreyas says. “But we can help people discover what their path looks like and find the right experts. We can help users think about things that trigger negative emotions, before they have a crisis.”

What to expect in the future?
“In the future, I believe that we will not have the feeling that we’re using a computer. Computing will be embedded in the spaces around us, so we don’t have to sit in front of one machine.” — Shreyas Kulkarni MS ’17

Irene Font Peradejordi MS ’21: the human side of AI

Since she was a child, Irene Font Peradejordi’s interests have straddled technology and social sciences. Irene grew up in Mataró, a small city near Barcelona, Spain. In high school she followed an engineering track and took the entrance exams to attend an engineering school. At the last minute, she changed course to pursue a degree in communication studies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. During her senior year, Irene studied abroad at Boston College, where she interned at an MIT Media Lab startup.

This experience piqued her interest in artificial intelligence (AI), and she earned a master’s degree in machine learning (ML) in the Netherlands. She then applied for and received a scholarship from the “la Caixa” Foundation (similar to a Fulbright grant) to further her studies in the U.S. She chose Cornell Tech because the Connective Media program enabled her to work at the intersection of social science and technology.

“My career path has been motivated by deep curiosities and inner motivations,” Irene says. “I was deeply interested in the more human side of AI — algorithmic bias. At Cornell Tech I was able to expand my socio-technical skills to build a career in Responsible Machine Learning.”

Non-linear career paths, as well as non-linear algorithms, are more complex and uncertain, but they can also have a much bigger expressive power.”

— Irene Font Peradejordi MS ’21

What is responsible ML?
“Algorithmic decision-making systems are trained to make decisions: for example, to choose and rank which content you might like the most, or to flag content as potentially harmful. Responsible ML is concerned with understanding the impact these decisions can have on society at large and on making sure the outcomes of these algorithms are fair and serve all people equitably.” — Irene Font Peradejordi MS ’21

Irene now works as a user researcher on Twitter’s META (Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability) team, a multidisciplinary group of about 20 people with expertise in both social sciences and technology. Team members are based around the world, but they collaborate closely. “Our paths end up crossing more than I would have expected,” she says. “I like to think that we are working on different building blocks that, in the end, all merge and work in unison.”

Irene’s role is to help design and deploy responsible and user-centered algorithmic systems. She explains that it’s difficult to foresee all potential problems, and that her team relies on direct feedback from users to uncover inequities. Feedback from diverse users helps Irene and her team identify unintended biases around race, age, gender, standards of beauty, disability status, and more — biases that they might not otherwise recognize.

“This was the motivation to launch the first Algorithmic Bias Bounty last year,” she says. “The bias bounty challenge helped us uncover a really wide range of issues in a short amount of time. We were able to learn from a diverse, global community of ethical AI hackers, whose lived experiences made it possible for them to discover unintended consequences in our models.”

Enjoy this clip of Irene kickboxing on the patio of The House at Cornell Tech in August 2020.

What to expect in the future?
“Letting algorithms decide what content you might find more relevant or how to crop the image you’re uploading might be convenient for some users, but it can also decrease your freedom of choice. I think we are going to see users having better control of algorithms and more agency over their user experiences.” — Irene Font Peradejordi MS ’21

Leanna Mulvihill MS ’20: one bite at a time

Farming was not a family affair for Leanna Mulvihill. She became interested in agroecology during her undergraduate studies at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. In 2014, Leanna dove in full-time to the world of livestock production — raising sheep, pigs, and cows on leased farmland in the Hudson Valley.

She faced many challenges, including: high labor costs, the precarious nature of farming on leased land, the difficulty of scaling up to turn a profit, and the lack of meat processing facilities in New York State.

“The business of agriculture is so consolidated that it’s difficult for small producers to become financially viable,” she says, adding, “It’s also difficult for wholesalers to purchase from small producers because of the logistics involved.”

After seven years, Leanna decided to sell her livestock business and go back to school. She was attracted by the interdisciplinary nature of Cornell Tech’s programs and by the fact that they welcomed non-traditional students. “My admission essay was about a really terrible trip to the slaughterhouse,” she says with a smile.

At Cornell Tech, she was one of a cohort of about 35 other students in the Connective Media program — most of whom were already working in tech fields. She was new to the industry. “No one was doing what I did,” Leanna says.

Leanna was working on her thesis, the Empire State of Food — a project to connect institutional buyers like schools and hospitals with small food producers — when the pandemic hit. In April 2020, she pivoted to work with a small distributor and local non-profit to deliver healthy food to 20 to 30 families in Brooklyn. “This was a very scary time in NYC,” she says. “Grocery shelves were empty, and I was grateful that families were willing to try this experiment with us.”

Rebuilding the local food system is a generational-sized problem.”

— Leanna Mulvihill MS ’20

After she graduated, Leanna applied for a product manager role with Rosie, an app that works with independent grocers across the country to deliver food to customers. Rosie was founded by Nick Nickitas MBA ’14 in 2012, while he was a student at Cornell.

Leanna says that Rosie is different from apps like Instacart in several ways. First, the company focuses on independent grocers and smaller retailers. “These are businesses that are definitely invested in local communities, and, frequently, they may be the only option for folks in that area,” Leanna explains.

Second, the grocers have greater control over their relationship with the customer: store employees package the orders, not gig workers. And stores maintain their own branding on the app, so that products are displayed in a way that’s consistent with the store’s own web site.

As product manager, Leanna’s role is to continue to enhance the user experience and functionality of the app. For example, she’s currently working to ensure that if a customer forgets an item once they place their order, they can easily add that item after checkout. She’s also working to improve the search functionality of the program, so that customers can search for hot dogs and get results that include hot dogs, as well as frankfurters.

“My favorite part of my work is the problem-solving aspect,” Leanna says. “It’s a small enough company that you know the team members and you can see the impact of your work,” she adds.

Rosie is supporting small businesses and providing more opportunities to small producers, she explains. “This is part of decentralizing our food system, so we don’t have empty grocery store shelves when supply chain issues disrupt big box stores,” she says.

What to expect in the future?
“We already have tech in the food and farming world, but we’re learning how apply it in new and creative ways. This will make it easier for buyers to purchase from local producers.” — Leanna Mulvihill MS ’20

This story originally appeared in the Cornell Alumni News.

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However, it was human (and not artificial) intelligence that led Isha Gandhi to join the ML team at Splunk — a data-monitoring software company that has partnered with 92 of the Fortune 100 companies on their ML projects and other technology challenges.

Combining a Passion for Entrepreneurship and Product Management with Technology

As a teenager, Gandhi wanted to be a professional tennis player — but developed an interest in mechanical engineering in the hopes of becoming a product designer.

I found mechanical engineering to be a very tangible application of math and science.”

Working in the automotive industry exposed her to the world of AI. She was a project manager on the digital transformation team, where she worked on proof of concepts for technologies to improve production and supply chain efficiency. For example, computer vision and deep learning can be used to detect defects in car components on the assembly line.

Over time, she was drawn to the idea that technology can be used to solve human challenges.

When Gandhi entered Cornell Tech, she realized that she needed to complement her interest in product management with a deeper understanding of the technology industry and the specific skills needed within that realm.

She was drawn to product management because it entails thinking critically to understand consumer needs and then translating those needs into action. She loved the fact that product management entails engineering, marketing, design, and even law. While studying, she took technical courses like Applied ML and participated in Startup Studio, and the skills she gained there not only helped her round out her product management expertise but also gave her the confidence to “conceptualize ML features at Splunk.” Her strengthened insights and belief in her own abilities enabled her to collaborate with data scientists and ML engineers post-graduation.

Currently working as a product manager for Splunk’s ML team, Gandhi helps drive strategy and builds ML-based services for Splunk’s product portfolio. Working very closely with product teams, she collaborates with her colleagues to define solutions and deliver features and functionality. Driving the product life-cycle requires conducting market research, analyzing telemetry and metrics, defining success criteria, consolidating specifications, and writing product requirements documents (PRDs).

Though my day-to-day role consists of a lot of writing, the cool part is actually having the opportunity to craft and paint a product vision behind it all.”

Relatively new to the job, Gandhi credits her internship at Splunk, along with her academic training, in shaping her career. During the internship, she was responsible for a series of competitive and market assessments and had an opportunity to recommend ML use cases for Splunk’s products. Some of her ideas from this internship eventually found their way into product roadmaps as key differentiators.

The Future of ML

“We can already identify and appreciate how drastically data and ML are changing the world,” said Gandhi, referencing the continued impact data will have on society in the future. “It will pave the way for innovations across industries!”

She points out, however, that ML doesn’t come without ethical risks. She believes she has a responsibility to factor in the human impact of ML on making key business decisions, and she is committed to encouraging and backing initiatives with positive societal impact.

Lessons Learned and Advice for Others

Gandhi is discovering that she can “have it all, but not at once.” She now believes that development takes time, and things change — a lot. She counsels other professionals starting out in their careers to set near-term goals for themselves so they can constantly learn.

Outrunning yourself will not only kill the enjoyment of learning but may lead to tunnel vision, preventing you from identifying golden opportunities and paths that suit your skills.”

Some skills that she’s fine-tuned along her own path are interpersonal communication, the ability to balance engineering techniques and business goals, and the ability to think on her feet, set priorities, and multi-task when needed. Machines may change our future, but human and genuine advice like Gandhi’s can shape careers.

The post When Human Meets Machine at Splunk: Isha Gandhi, ORIE ’21 appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Cooper sheds light on her daily responsibilities and reveals where the industry is likely to move in the future. She also shares valuable tips for prospective students seeking a career in product management.

While managing her day-to-day tasks at LinkedIn, Cooper is also a part of the leadership team of an internal Employee Resource Group (ERG) that aims to close the opportunity gap for Black people in tech.

What was your general trajectory to arriving at LinkedIn?

I started my career in advertising. I worked at a few different media agencies doing media planning and buying across digital channels for larger brands in a variety of industries — travel, tech, financial services. I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to be a long-term fit for me and I was interested in leaning into a more technical role, but I had to spend some time thinking critically about what that ideal role was for me.

I realized that some of the interactions that I valued the most from my agency life were meeting with product managers at advertising technology (AdTech) companies that I would buy media from — companies who were conducting user research to inform their roadmaps. I liked the balance of tech, business, and user research in that role. And so, I started looking into product management more.

I realized pretty quickly that it’s hard to get traction without having a product or technical experience. So I decided to pursue the MBA at Cornell Tech to help plug in those gaps in terms of technical and design skills and use that to help better position me to transition into product management.”

After receiving my MBA from Cornell Tech, I landed my first product role at an AdTech company, where I was able to crystallize that knowledge. And then, after several years there, I made the transition over to product at LinkedIn.

What is your day-to-day role in the company like at LinkedIn?

It’s a traditional product role in the sense that you own a specific product area, and you’re responsible for setting the roadmap and vision for that area and executing on that roadmap. What that means on a more day-to-day basis is that you partner very closely with functions like engineering, design, business operations (BizOps), and marketing to gather insights, prioritize work, communicate requirements, conduct user research, and measure the impact of our products.

What I find unique about product management at LinkedIn are the vision and culture. The vision at LinkedIn is to create economic opportunities for every member of the global workforce. This is obviously a lofty goal, but it’s one that really resonates for me and keeps me motivated day-to-day.

On the culture front, I’ve really appreciated the support and the community that I’m able to tap into through LinkedIn’s ERG communities. Specifically, I’m on the leadership team of our Black Inclusion Group, or BIG. I get to see first-hand through that role the incredible work and the programming this group creates and puts out. Being able to contribute to and benefit from those events and programs has been a huge highlight of this role at LinkedIn for me.

Where do you see this industry moving in the next 5-10 years?

What I’m most passionate about moving or changing in the industry is representation. We need more Black folks and underrepresented folks in technical roles, especially at more senior levels. As a Black woman in product management, I do feel more acutely aware of my otherness and I’ve seen the way that it heightens imposter syndrome and feelings of anxiety that I experienced in my day-to day-work. I want to see that change for the people that come after me, and I believe that it will. The industry is moving in that direction.

Second, I see a shift towards more inclusive product management methodologies. It’s taken some time, but I think the industry is finally realizing the importance of being intentional in the way that we build products. By default, and often as a consequence of the lack of representation, we’ve put technology out into the world that doesn’t meet the needs of people using it, including marginalized communities.

I would like to see a future where teams are consistently thoughtful about how the technology we build has implications beyond the immediate scope of the project — including the ways in which it could be potentially misused or disadvantage certain groups — and try and course correct for those scenarios early on in the product lifecycle.”

What advice do you wish you received before you entered the industry?

I think one is: I wish I knew that having conviction in your ideas is half the battle. As a product manager, you have to convince various stakeholders to buy into your vision. They’re only going to believe it if you believe it. So, projecting that confidence is huge, and it gets you a long way.

The other piece of advice is: don’t expect to have 100% certainty in the decisions you make. In a product role, you often have to make decisions with limited data. It’s important to be honest about your assumptions where the data is not there, but you also have to make some strategic bets based on the information you do have. Otherwise, you’re not going to make progress, and you’re going to miss out on opportunities. So, I would say those are the two things I learned from being in the role.

What are the 2-3 qualities/skills you’ve developed that allowed you to succeed in your Product Manager role?

I would say, one — it’s overused — but I do truly think empathy and being able to work well with a variety of different personality types is critical. There’s a lot of people that you work closely with on a regular basis in a product role that you don’t directly manage. You need to be able to meet them where they’re at and establish genuine relationships to move fast and get things done.

The second one is bias for action. As a product manager, you own your own charter and it’s your responsibility to make sure that it moves forward. So while product strategy and long-term vision are critical to this role, equally so is execution and making sure that that vision comes to life. That includes setting smaller, more concrete milestones to make progress towards your long-term goals.

What are the 2-3 pieces of advice you’d like to give to students seeking a career in product management?

• Don’t sell yourself short: There’s no exact archetype of a product manager, nor should there be, in my opinion. I think that great product managers come from a variety of backgrounds and skillsets. So be confident and proud of the unique experience you bring to the table and how it can apply to a product role.
• Don’t be discouraged by rejection: Product management is a high-demand role. The interview process can be rigorous and involve a lot of rejection. I definitely have not nailed every product management interview, but I think each experience has taught me something and allowed me to ultimately get to where I am today. So I’m grateful for that.
• Don’t underestimate the value of connections: Don’t be afraid to message that former peer or co-worker, even if it’s scary or embarrassing. Those are often the connections that can get you to that phone screen that ultimately changes the trajectory of your career. Always leverage connections.

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Even while he was just a Computer Engineering undergraduate in India he was working on multiple projects, collecting Twitter data and detecting micro-communities around the Indian Premier League. Some of the analyses included determining the most popular teams and the favorite players. 

Not drawn toward a conventional computer science (CS) degree, when it came time to get his Master’s, Jain chose to pursue a Jacobs Technion-Cornell Dual Master of Science Degree with a Concentration in Connective Media. He believes that it is important to understand the human aspect of technology as much as it is to understand the intricacies of its systems, which is what this program offered him.

Connective Media, to me, meant understanding how technology connects humans and impacts them.”

Cornell Tech gave him the chance to improve his machine learning (ML) knowledge while deep diving into HCI research, which he said may not have happened with a traditional CS Master’s degree.

During his time at Cornell Tech, he invested his energy into research related to social media data in Professor Mor Naaman’s Connected Experiences (Cx) Lab. Through his work, he broadened his knowledge of machine learning and learned about the social and psychological aspects of technology. Under the guidance of Serge Belongie, Jain worked with his teammates to create Palpiction, an app aimed at understanding how we can use ML to make images more accessible for the visually impaired. Combining ML and HCI, Jain said that it was a great learning opportunity.

Simultaneously, he developed an entrepreneurial mindset through co-founding Pallette, a wireless remote control for the tongue designed to enable the mobility impaired — and forging lifelong connections along the way. Always wanting to make an impact on the lives of others, he used his time at Cornell Tech to connect with engineers at Twitter and share his work with them. These engineers, in turn, helped Jain land an interview with the company.

Fast-forward to today: Rohit Jain is now a Staff ML Engineer on the Content Quality team at Twitter.

In his current role, he is responsible for leading the team ranking Twitter conversations — that is, identifying the most relevant replies while reducing the traction towards toxic conversations on the platform. The team also works on adding ranking to new content-related initiatives, such as Twitter fleets. He writes up design documents and helps other engineers on the team hash through ideas, giving them a push in the right direction as needed. Eager to foster the growth of his team, he assists in hiring and mentoring new engineers and is constantly collaborating with other teams to brainstorm innovative ways in which their teamwork can help other stakeholders in the company.

Jain believes his biggest achievement at the company so far has been identifying an opportunity for creating a new team, validating it, and getting the buy-in from the top leadership — through all this hard work, his Content Quality team was born. Throughout this process, he also learned about the importance of iterative product development and ways to validate new ideas. He would start off with basic features, and experiment and improvise. With each experiment came a lot of learning and new team members. As the workload grew and results started to surface, it led to the creation of a formal team.

I strongly believe that the qualities that have helped me succeed in my role at Twitter are: identifying ways to validate ideas faster, thinking bigger, and being empathetic to folks I work with.”

Jain feels that responsible ML is going to see a surge in implementation in incoming years as the need to increase meaningful engagement across platforms and industries rises. He predicts that developer tooling will be used to try out new ideas faster and to learn from failures, and he even thinks that ML will be provided as an outsourced service as demand rises — especially in areas where people don’t have the time or skill to do it themselves. Jain mentioned that research around the impact of recommendation products on mental health would be a major theme, where it could be used to find ways of documenting and addressing the various technology side effects people are exposed to each day.

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Willy Lin, Product Lead at Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI), is playing a major role in bringing the timeless industry of beer brewing into the next century. 

Lin’s Path to the Beverage World

Lin first connected with ABI at a blitz interview event during his time studying Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE) at Cornell Tech. He was one of four students invited to ABI’s New York headquarters, where he was offered a summer internship. As a member of the product team, his performance was so strong that he was offered a full-time position in the Tech Supply department. This group handles the technology around supply, meaning that it works toward improving the company’s beer production in order to increase the bottom line across the board.

“I’m in the business of making our breweries more efficient through data access, transparency, and predictive analytics,” said Lin. He views his success in the role as something that can be clearly measured through cost savings and improvements in how much beer is produced. 

He starts his day at 7 am with stand-up meetings involving team members from across the globe (such as India and Brazil), followed by more meetings to discuss progress on data science models, infrastructure deployment, department alignment, and other production and management topics. During the afternoon, when his coworkers on the other side of the world have stopped work, Lin uses that time to focus on timelines, implementation plans, e-mails, and user feedback.

Lin’s efforts have helped bring plant floor data to the cloud, and his team performs advanced analytics that help deliver streamlined production and profitability. Their current project, known as the “Digital Factory” journey, entails deploying Internet of Things (IoT) Infrastructure to globally aggregate PLC data, or data from machines and connected devices. So far, it has yielded a completed fermentation KPI machine learning model. Two more are in development, while four breweries have adopted this current model.

But Lin’s role is not limited to short-term automation and analytics. Navigating the wants and needs of all regional zones and aligning them around a global goal is one of his long-term missions. So, his objectives and role extend way beyond one of technology. 

He credits Cornell Tech with helping him prepare for this position. 

I was able to appreciate diverse viewpoints from people with different backgrounds all working towards one product goal. This gave me skills and perspectives that I could use to establish integrated best practices in my work.”

How the Beer Industry is Evolving

Lin said that companies are becoming much more reliant on data to drive insights and value. “Getting accurate and valid data at each step of the brewing process, as well as maintenance, packaging, and energy use are all becoming important,” he said. 

He believes that the industry is behind the curve in terms of data science sophistication, but is quickly catching up. “We will see many more companies relying on data science models, driving advanced process controls to automate many portions of the beer-making process,” he said. 

Lin’s Advice for Job-Seekers is Simple and Powerful

Don’t be afraid to take chances on internships.”

“I turned down full-time DS roles to pursue a riskier internship in product,” said Lin. However, it’s not all been easy — he started his job during the pandemic and face-to-face exposure to the business has been tough. He said that he wishes someone had given him a month-long class on brewing, complete with daily tastings and brewery tours. Direct exposure to internal clients’ pain points, he said, can help a Product Manager deliver better data and more practical solutions to challenges.

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The Nigerian-born Cornell Tech alumna is responsible for leading global sales at WANdisco while partnering closely with Microsoft and liaising with international customers. The company develops data replication technology that enables its customers to solve critical data management challenges created by the shift to cloud computing.

“Understanding the intricacies of different cultures and how to sell to all these different places is [one] thing that I have to deal with,” explained Oje. The role also requires that she work closely with colleagues in the marketing, sales, and engineering departments. “I’m literally talking across the board.”

A former Microsoft technical sales executive, Oje joined WANdisco two months ago. She says her biggest accomplishment while she’s been there has been creating clarity on how to work strategically with Microsoft.

However, Oje hasn’t always been on the business end of tech. Initially, she worked in software engineering roles for the banking sector. “When I was in college, I really wanted to work in a bank. I felt like it was sexy — they all wore suits. Banking looked very important and powerful, and I wanted to be very important and powerful.”

After some time working in finance, Oje realized that her back-office job in software engineering wasn’t perceived as being as powerful as the bankers were. “I didn’t like it, to be quite honest, and it sparked my curiosity about how companies make money and who the decision-makers are.” 

With that, she switched gears to become a business leader within the tech sector. 

Passionate about coding at the time, she wanted to teach other Africans to code.

I was always the only female African, everywhere I went, that was coding. I really wanted to encourage more people to be [coding] around me.”

She started work on what has now become Africode, a non-profit mentorship organization that assists mentees in launching their tech careers.

To date, over 500 people have passed through the organization’s programs and initiatives. The organization’s biggest impact, Oje pointed out, has been helping over 90 percent of its alumni finish their CS degrees. Africode has also helped at least 10 mentees land jobs at Microsoft, with more getting roles at Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and several smaller companies. In addition, at least 10 Africode alumni have gone on to start their own ventures.

In the process of setting up the non-profit, she became curious about other business questions — like how companies generated revenue. 

Oje then decided to get a business degree from Cornell Tech. She explained that she specifically chose the institution because she wanted to be a business leader in the tech sector. “I wasn’t looking to go into banking or consulting or all those other industries that I felt people [went into] after business school.” While at Cornell Tech, she learned to establish companies as part of a startup project. “Some people actually [ended] up starting up companies that have been acquired and all of that which is amazing. I chose not to continue with my company.”

Upon obtaining her Johnson Cornell Tech MBA in 2016, she joined Microsoft. She held multiple positions at the company over the years — from leading Azure technical sales to overseeing the Northeast and Midwest partnership business, to eventually leading strategy for financial services enterprise customers as Senior Azure Data and AI Enterprise Sales Leader. Since then, she said, she knew she wanted to be in the data space, as “after companies move to the cloud, the next thing they are looking for is to figure out how to harness their data and gain intelligence from it ” 

She believes her experience at Microsoft helped her secure the job at WANdisco, and that her strong technical expertise, passion, and understanding of the product enable her to demonstrate and sell to technical executives. She added that her ability to distill complex things into simple steps has also helped her succeed in her role, especially when it comes to communication. The firm needed someone that understood the partner space, as well as the data and AI sales at Microsoft. “My experience in partnerships and sales combined with my focus on data and AI uniquely positioned me for this role.”

Oje wishes she’d been advised away from working at a bank before starting in tech. In her native Nigeria, working at a bank was “the thing to do.” She recalls not taking her interviews with Google and Microsoft seriously, as her casually-dressed recruiters didn’t look “serious enough” for her. “If someone told me, ‘that’s where the innovation is,’ I’d probably have taken my interviews a little bit more seriously on that side of my career.” However, Oje has “no regrets” and is glad she worked in finance, as she would eventually come around to working with banks later on in her career at Microsoft.

She said that in the next five to 10 years, as more people work online and as more data is collected, effective and affordable storage of data, alongside strong security against fraud and identity theft, is going to be crucial. “How do you store it, how do you access it? How do you search effectively, and how do you gain insights? Because it’s one thing to have data everywhere, but how do you gain insights from that data? That’s going to be key.”

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Takaki recently helped to launch new features for creators to make their content shoppable, earn commissions through affiliate links, and partner with brands on sponsored content.   

How Did Miwa Arrive at Her Current Role?

At Cornell Tech, Miwa was eager to learn more about AI and machine learning, so she used Product Studio as an opportunity to work on a project that would help her get familiar with machine learning techniques through implementing them in real-life applications.  

After business school at Cornell Tech, Takaki joined eBay NYC’s Recommendations team as a senior product manager — the same team she collaborated with during Product Studio and where she got first-hand experience working with ML products. During her time at eBay, she worked on developing a large-scale personalization platform, expanded core discovery and product recommendations, and led R&D for new deep learning applications.  She also led the NYC office’s employee programs for campus outreach, recruiting, and philanthropy. 

While Takaki says that New York will always hold a special place in her heart, she eventually decided to move back west to be closer to family after a five-year stint in the city. When a former colleague from eBay approached her with an opportunity to work on scaling Pinterest’s content understanding platform — which powers much of the company’s critical systems like content safety, personalization, and ads safety — she couldn’t say no. As a long-time Pinterest user, she was thrilled to work on a product she knew and loved.

While driving the backend systems that power much of Pinterest’s content recommendation engines, Miwa yearned to learn more about company strategy while engaging with the core user, the content creator. When a new role opened up on the creator products team, she jumped at the opportunity.

“I was excited by the prospect of approaching a problem that was much more nascent to the company,” Takaki says. “I was pumped for the opportunity to work on a ‘zero to one’ product space.” As a product lead for the team, she was responsible for helping to launch the company’s newest immersive video format and tooling for creators.

Cornell Tech played a significant role in Takaki’s career path. She believes it gave her the confidence to take on new challenges, like accepting a machine learning role even when she didn’t have an extensive technical background. She says it also brought home the idea that technology is a powerful force in changing people’s lives. 

A Day in the Life at Pinterest

“I’m in the process now of building and growing a new team, so I’ve been hiring and putting together the product vision,” she says. “I love building things from scratch and everything that goes into the process of discovery and exploration of all the many possibilities and pathways for a product to come to life.”

Her favorite aspects of being a product manager are talking with creators and users and working closely with a talented team of researchers, designers, and engineers. “This ultimately means figuring out how to bring together the aspirational and feasible, moving and testing rapidly,” says Takaki.

At Pinterest, I enjoy getting to work on a product that inspires people to grow, learn, and create a life they love.  I figure out how to bring together the aspirational and feasible, moving and testing rapidly.”

Advice for Other STEM Professionals

At Pinterest, Takaki helped launch a new video-first native format, Idea Pins, and other tools creators need to share ideas, engage with an inspired community, and build and grow their business on the platform. These experiences have taught her that as women and men build their careers in tech, they need to overcome their fear of making mistakes.

She learned to take risks, stretch herself beyond her limits, and speak up when she disagreed. She believes these are all important keys to growth and success. Takaki defines success as the impact of the work on others. “Does the work you’re doing make a meaningful change to someone’s life? Do you enable the people around you — your teammates, your friends, your family — to be empowered and succeed?” 

What the Future Holds

Over the next five to ten years, Takaki believes that the primary role of technology will be to enable, empower, and enhance unique experiences in real life.

She counsels others in technology careers to start small and test quickly, break down problems into bite-size chunks, and find mentors who will help you grow. 

Takaki also stresses the human side of technology careers. “Prioritize giving back and employ empathy and mentorship for others,” she advises. “There’s always something you can learn from the people around you.”

The post The Path to Pinterest: Miwa Takaki, MBA ’15 appeared first on Cornell Tech.

If I could do this with video games, imagine how I could apply this knowledge in other areas — the potentials are limitless.”

Osasumwen Eboh, Master of Engineering in Computer Science (CS) ’17 and a software engineer at Aurora, opens up about his education, career aspirations, and the idol that inspired him to pursue a career in computer science. 

Eboh’s interest in CS has been constant since childhood. His journey to become a software engineer began at Rutgers University, where he studied Electrical and Computer Engineering. From hacking video games for fun to working as a software engineer for AT&T and Uber, Eboh has been living the life of his dreams at his current organization, Aurora. 

What sparked your interest in CS?

Like many kids around nine or 10, I was heavily into video games — and at the time, I was into a game called Pokémon Ruby. One of the objectives was to catch all the Pokémon, and I didn’t really want to invest all of that time. So I’d started to learn how to hack the game. 

After that, I continued with other games like RuneScape and MapleStory — and realized I enjoyed the process of reverse-engineering the games more than actually playing them. So, that became one of my core interests. Eventually, it became chiseled in my head that, if I could do this with video games, I could apply this knowledge in other areas. 

During my high school days, Facebook was just starting to come up. I really got enamored with Mark Zuckerberg’s story of dropping out of college and starting this entire multi-billion dollar business out of a little dorm-room side project. So, all those different childhood influences and the idea of being able to pursue whatever you want enticed me to go for CS and programming.

How did you eventually end up pursuing your CS master’s degree at Cornell Tech?

I wanted to go back to school to try something else, but I didn’t want a repeat of undergrad where I just take courses and write assignments. I wanted something challenging, something that I could bring back into my career. So, I thought going to Cornell Tech would be a great experience, offering academic challenges mixed with an entrepreneurial scene.

How has Cornell Tech helped you achieve your career goals?

It helped me really understand the software development cycle. At AT&T Labs, there was an atmosphere of, “here, do this and just code away” — you didn’t have to think about the business or user aspects. But at Cornell Tech, I worked with all the different sides of a project, whether it be the design or the business aspects, how to get customers, or the actual coding. Everything is put together, and in that way, you’re really challenged at Cornell Tech.

So, nowadays, when I go into various meetings, I’m more aware of these different things. I’m not just worried about the requirements for me to code or how these records are being formed. That extra layer is now in my head and operates on its own as I work and communicate with other people on the team.

Whatever you choose to work in is going to be valuable, as long as you get an education and experience and become an expert in your domain. That’s all that really matters. Because, whether you’re black, white, male, or female, no one can take your knowledge away from you.”

After chatting a bit about Eboh’s experience at Cornell Tech, we also got the opportunity to discuss his current field of work, and to know more about his day-to-day duties at Aurora — an automotive company that focuses on autonomous driving technology.

Can you briefly describe your day-to-day responsibilities at Aurora?

As a self-driving vehicle company we manage the trucks’ autonomy, i.e., the autonomous software running on the vehicles and the auxiliary services that live in the cloud to help support the same. Currently, I’m on the vehicle Input/Output (I/O)  team. We handle all the aspects of messages that are sent and received by the vehicle.

My core responsibilities are focused on the logging side. We have certain tools where you can write logs or messages from the vehicle onto a disk, and tools on the other end of the pipeline where you can read all of the vehicle logs for post-processing. All of these tools are written in C++, and we focus on making sure things are as efficient and error-free as possible. Hence, there’s a lot of optimization work that’s being done.

What seems to be a major challenge in the US for applying autonomous driving on a mass level?

I would say one of the biggest hurdles is the unpredictability of driving. It’s easy for a human to adapt to whatever situation they’re in. But for computers, it’s more complex. There are so many different situations where something wrong could happen, so you always want to cover all these different use cases. That’s the biggest challenge we’re trying to figure out.

What impact do you feel your work has had so far?

I would say my work is definitely helping to make it easier for other developers to quickly iterate and fix any issues that they have. With the logs, you have all the information you need to know for what’s happening on the vehicle and to figure out what has to be done or resolved. This is documented every time there’s a different issue or error case that happens. Without the logs, we wouldn’t have the information required to make these kinds of quick decisions. My work is helping to improve that pipeline of information so that we have it when we really need it and can understand what needs to be done for the future.

Are you also working on any fun projects these days?

I’ve been looking into quantum computing. There’s a course on brilliant.org that I’ve been taking to understand quantum computers and the different algorithms involved with them. I think conventional computing has had a very long runway, but quantum computing is definitely up next. The possibilities with it are endless. We just have to figure out how to make a stable quantum computer that everyone can have. Then we can understand how to apply quantum computing in various areas like security, messaging, and complex calculations.

What are the three pieces of advice you’d give to prospective students seeking a career in CS?

• Always be curious and learning.
• Don’t be afraid to fail and share whatever you’re working on.
• Technical knowledge is only half of software engineering. If you want to excel, you have to know how to communicate.

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Otari is a smart exercise mat that uses computer-vision algorithms to recognize how your body is moving in three-dimensional space, and then gives real-time feedback and improvement tips. Designed with city dwellers and space-saving in mind, the mat can be stored in a closet and easily taken out for use.

Otari was founded in Startup Studio in spring 2019 by Chris Kruger and Skyler Erickson, both Masters of Engineering in Computer Science ‘19, and was one of four winners of Cornell Tech’s 2019 Startup Awards.

Learn more about Otari’s story and read a Q&A with Co-Founder and CEO Chris Kruger.

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