The new Cornell Tech Venture Fellows Program at the Jacobs Institute allows individuals to immerse themselves with a cohort of academically-minded entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs from diverse global businesses at Cornell University’s state-of-the-art tech campus in the heart of New York City.

The program is powered by Cornell Tech’s successful Runway Startups Program in the Jacobs Institute, which has launched more than 100 startups since 2014. Today those startups are valued at more than $660 million. They include businesses started by postdoctoral fellows as well as master’s degree candidates who pursue ventures through Cornell Tech’s Studio program.

Now, in addition to the existing startup opportunities on its campus, Cornell Tech will offer corporate leaders the chance to identify talented employees with similar potential for this new Venture Fellows Program.

“Supporting new tech ventures is core to Cornell Tech’s mission and we are thrilled to offer companies this unique opportunity on our campus, which is custom-built for cutting-edge entrepreneurial explorations,” says Greg Morrisett, Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech. “We look forward to seeing what new ventures emerge from these corporate partnerships.”

The Cornell Tech Venture Fellows Program promises to transform companies’ most talented scientists and technologists into business leaders through this intensive training and education program that allows them to acquire valuable commercialization and leadership skills designed to boost their company’s R&D priorities. The first cohort of up to 5 fellows will begin in fall of 2024.

“As a former corporate and academic researcher and co-founder of multiple startups, I have experienced firsthand the challenges of translating raw technology discovery into commercial products and ventures,” says Israel Cidon, Director of the Jacobs Cornell-Technion Institute. “This new program helps corporate leaders  bridge this gap by unlocking potential within their workforce and empowering them to take ideas to market.”

“Corporations possess amazing technical and scientific talent that is underutilized,” adds Fernando Gómez-Boquero, Director of Runway and Spinouts at Cornell Tech. “Our program will train and mentor this corporate talent so that they become leaders of the next generations of products and services, creating billions in value for their corporations and even more value for customers and the world. We have already trained hundreds of scientists, built over 100 companies, and generated billions in enterprise value. We are now ready to open up this valuable program to more partners in New York City and around the world.”

The program is open to employees from any industry interested in emerging business models utilizing deep technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technologies that meet the program’s deep tech criteria.

Find more information on the program here.

The post New Venture Fellow Program Allows Companies to Explore Business Opportunities at Cornell Tech appeared first on Cornell Tech.

The computing sector accounted for an estimated three percent of global CO2 emissions in 2022 — more than Spain, Italy, France, and Portugal combined. Still, compared to the staggering impacts of fossil fuels, that number may seem insignificant. But every emission counts when it comes to combating the climate crisis, and this sector is only expected to grow over the coming decades as the demand for computing increases.

That’s why tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Intel are committing to sustainable computing — to curb this potential impact. Joining them in this collective action is Udit Gupta (BS ‘16), assistant professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and member of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University.

Gupta will have the opportunity to confront these challenges directly through projects funded by two grants he received from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) through its Design for Environmental Sustainability in Computing program.

“There is a dire need to think critically about sustainable computing,” Gupta stresses. “Already computing accounts for three percent of worldwide emissions. But the total environmental impact is even broader in terms of energy consumed by data centers and charging mobile phones, [the] water consumed to run data centers and semiconductor fabs, and e-waste of discarded devices.”

Gupta received a $2 million grant to study the environmental impact of edge computing devices — such as smartwatches, tablets, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, sensors, and smartphones — and address their escalating environmental toll. Joining him in the effort are Professor Amit Lal from the Cornell School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Associate Professor Vijay Janapa Reddi of Harvard University, and Associate Professor Josiah Hester and Professor Omer Inan of Georgia Tech.

With the funding, the team plans to develop an end-to-end, open-source framework named Delphi, a sort of toolkit for future designers, engineers, and manufacturers to reference as they create the next generation of edge computing devices. The suite of design tools will emphasize environmental impact, sustainability, and longevity without sacrificing user experience or performance.

To create Delphi, the researchers will collect a groundbreaking dataset documenting the actual emissions and resources associated with the creation of edge devices. Not only will this data help with the development of Delphi, but it will also help establish an Electronic Sustainability Record for edge devices — sort of like the nutrition labels on our food. According to Gupta, this transparency is crucial for both consumers and manufacturers.

“Electronic Sustainability Records are a key way to raise awareness of the environmental impact of devices,” Gupta explains. “Consumers get visibility on the climate impact their products have, empowering them to make sustainability-focused decisions. For manufacturers, the electronics sustainability records enable fine-grained tracking of individual components over the lifetime of devices; this allows us to balance device performance, efficiency, and application quality with sustainability.”

These types of disclosures, tools, and resources couldn’t come at a better time, as 2023 marks the hottest year on record, drawing more eyes to the problem with each new generation.

In September 2023, Gupta also received a $300,000 Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award from the NSF to develop cloud infrastructures for designing sustainable electronics. As principal investigator, Gupta hopes to use cloud resources to build a shared community infrastructure and tools to measure the carbon footprint of computing platforms across their lifetimes — from assembly line to daily operation. Future engineers and designers can use these resources to weigh sustainability statistics alongside traditional performance metrics.

The post Udit Gupta Leads $2 Million Project to Tackle Tech’s Environmental Toll appeared first on Cornell Tech.

“These amazing additions to our faculty roster bolster Cornell Tech’s unwavering commitment to fostering innovation, groundbreaking research, and collaborative learning in the AI era,” said Cornell Tech Dean and Vice Provost Greg Morrisett. “With a passion for pushing the boundaries of knowledge, our new faculty will make a tremendous impact on our campus, in the tech industry and academia, as well as the global community.”

The new faculty are joining a distinguished cohort of professors who are dedicated to shaping the next generation of tech leaders and innovators across key areas including artificial intelligence and machine learning and health. Their work will contribute to the advancement of knowledge and the development of innovative solutions that make a positive impact on society.

Effective July 1, 2023:

Frank Pasquale is a Professor of Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. He is an expert on the law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. Before coming to Cornell, Pasquale held chaired professorships at the University of Maryland, Seton Hall University, and Brooklyn Law School. His books include The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015) and New Laws of Robotics (Harvard University Press, 2020). He has published more than 70 journal articles and book chapters and co-edited The Oxford Handbook on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Transparent Data Mining for Big and Small Data (Springer-Verlag, 2017).

Jae-sun Seo joins Cornell Tech as an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Dr. Seo comes from Arizona State University, where he was an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. His research interests include efficient hardware design of machine learning / neuromorphic algorithms and integrated power management. Dr. Seo was a visiting researcher at Intel and Meta, and he has been recognized with awards from IBM, NSF, Intel, and IEEE.

Kyra Gan is an Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell Tech. Prior to joining Cornell, Dr. Gan was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Harvard Statistics and earned her Ph.D. degree in Operations Research from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include adaptive/online algorithm design in personalized treatment under constrained settings, computerized/automated inference methods, robust causal discovery in medical data, and fairness in organ transplants.

Udit Gupta joins the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as a visiting assistant professor for the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute. His research lies at the intersection of computer architecture, systems for machine learning, and sustainable computing. During his PhD in computer science at Harvard University he was also a Visiting Research Scientist at Meta AI.

Effective August 16, 2023:

Alex Conway is joining Cornell Tech as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science. Prior to Cornell Tech, Conway served as a researcher at VMware Research Group where he primarily focused on randomized data structures and their applications to memory and storage systems. He earned his PhD in computer science from Rutgers University.

Effective January 1, 2024:

Raaz Dwivedi comes to Cornell Tech as an Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering. He earned his Ph.D at EECS, UC Berkeley. His research focuses on building effective strategies for personalized decision-making with theory and methods across causal inference, reinforcement learning, and distribution compression, and applications to healthcare. Prior to Cornell, he was a postdoc jointly between Harvard and MIT, and spent time at Microsoft Research. He has received the President of India Gold Medal at IIT Bombay, the Berkeley Fellowship, teaching awards at UC Berkeley and Harvard, and a best student paper award for his work on optimal compression.

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.

The post Cornell Tech Welcomes Six New Faculty Members in 2023-24 Academic Year appeared first on Cornell Tech.

NEW YORK (August 22, 2023) – Cornell Tech announced today that Prof. Israel Cidon – entrepreneur, renowned leader in network engineering and former faculty member and Dean at the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Technion–Israel Institute of Technology – joins Cornell Tech as director of the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell institute. Cidon will succeed Ron Brachman whose appointment began in 2016.

The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech pushes the boundaries of academia at Cornell Tech, with dual-degree programs in Health Tech, Connective Media, and Urban Tech. Since its founding, the Jacobs Institute has incubated 42 new startup companies, which have filed almost 50 patent applications and secured more than $200 million in private funding. More than 80% of these companies are still operating and, in aggregate, they employ well over 200 employees in New York City.

As the new Director, Cidon will lead the Jacobs Institute’s strategic vision as it continues to grow its interdisciplinary, translational research focused on grand challenges in the digital realm; its innovative dual-degree programs; and its commitment to inclusive entrepreneurship.

“Professor Cidon has led groundbreaking research, co-founded several successful start-ups and developed 65  U.S. patents covering aspects of data networks including mobility, packet switching, security, Internet, and beyond,” said Cornell Tech Dean and Vice Provost Greg Morrisett. “His extensive expertise, start-up and industrial research experience – including at VMWare, one of Silicon Valley’s leading companies – will be fundamental to advancing the Jacobs Institute’s mission of offering a global perspective on research, education, technology transfer, commercialization and entrepreneurship.”

“Professor Israel Cidon is an esteemed computer networking researcher with extensive management experience at the Technion,” said Technion President Professor Uri Sivan. “As Dean he led the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering to significant achievements. Professor Cidon has a rich and successful background in entrepreneurship, and he maintains close relationships with the industry. I am confident that he will contribute significantly to strengthening the collaborations between Technion and Cornell University and advancing research and development at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute.”

“The Jacobs Institute represents the academic partnership between Cornell University and the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology at Cornell Tech,” said Israel Cidon, Head of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute. “It’s a privilege to succeed Ron Brachman as director of the Jacobs Institute and build upon Ron’s leadership, furthering the institute’s innovative approach to research and industry partnership.”

Cidon comes to the Institute from VMware Research, where for over six years he served as Vice President and Researcher working on high-performance, world-wide networks that bridged IoT, data centers, public clouds and more, enabling and optimizing geo-distributed modern applications. Prior to his time at VMware, he worked as a faculty member at The Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, published over 180 peer reviewed papers and served as Dean of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2006 to 2010. Cidon has cofounded a number of technology companies, including Micronet Ltd., an early mobile data entry pioneer; Actona Technology, which introduced the basic technology for WAN optimization; Viola Networks, a network quality of service testing and diagnosis; and Sookasa, an organizational SaaS security platform.

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 Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology celebrates its first centennial this year. The impact of the Technion on Israel’s economy, society and defense is unmatched. It has long leveraged boundary-crossing collaborations to advance breakthrough research and technologies that impacted the world. Now, with a presence in three countries, the Technion prepares the next generation of global innovators. Technion people, ideas and inventions made immeasurable contributions to the world, innovating in fields from cancer research and sustainable energy to communication theory, quantum technologies, nanotechnology, and computer science.

The post Israel Cidon Joins Cornell Tech as Director of the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute appeared first on Cornell Tech.

By Liana Began, Cornell Tech

On March 6-7, 2023, the Heath Tech Hub of the Jacobs Technion–Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech broke down the silos across the healthcare sectors and disciplines and brought together clinical practitioners, researchers, health tech entrepreneurs, care delivery organizations, and payers for a two-day Behavioral Health Next Summit at the Verizon Executive Education Center on Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island campus. The Summit was led by Dr. Tanzeem Choudhury, Roger and Joelle Burnell Professor in Integrated Health and Technology at Cornell Tech and Director of Health Tech, Danish Munir, Founding Partner at GreyMatter Capital, Ian Chiang, Partner at Flare Capital Partners, and sponsored by Optum and The Carson Family Charitable Trust.

Improving healthcare outcomes and delivery have always been important issues in the industry, but the increasing incorporation of digital technology in healthcare is creating more discussions on how and when these tools are used. Across the tech and healthcare industries, there is hope that by partnering early on through the diagnosis and prevention stages, patient care and treatment can be improved significantly. The COVID-19 pandemic signaled a clear shift in doctor/patient interactions. Doctors have adopted technology to conduct patient meetings virtually through Zoom and created new dashboard apps that allow patients to access their health records or review past visits. One thing is for sure — these shifts are happening and that digital connection is here to stay. However, while the benefits of blending technology with traditional healthcare are clear, what does the impact of this partnership mean for mental healthcare?

The Behavioral Health Next Summit brought together a diverse community of medical and tech professionals who shared thoughts and ideas on the state of the industry, and, more importantly, what actions can be taken within the tech space both now and in the future regarding mental healthcare. There were 35 speakers representing over 50 different organizations from startups to clinicians, providers, and academics. Keynote speaker Patrick J. Kennedy, former U.S. Representative and founder of The Kennedy Forum, kicked off the Summit by speaking on the importance of personal health data and shared his own personal struggles with mental health and addiction throughout his political career with a clear call to action for a modern-day advocacy group in the behavioral health space.

New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan led the second day’s discussion focusing on what problems the industry is solving and how that aligns with what patients need. Dr. Vasan also spoke on the importance of data and why it is crucial for the private and public sectors to work together to better the overall system. Dr. Vasan closed his talk by discussing how mental health struggles vastly differ from physical diseases and called for the immediate need to examine how mental health is addressed and treated: “We are in a mental health crisis, COVID has just put gasoline on the fire.”

Throughout the Summit, over 200 attendees from the community were brought together and experienced first-hand demonstrations from companies such as Cornell Tech startups MyLÚA Health and BreathePulse as well as from Cornell Tech PhD candidates. Dr. Jim Yong Kim, Vice Chairman and President of Global Infrastructure Partners and former President of World Bank Group, closed the Summit by speaking on his experiences working on HIV treatments and tackling existing behavioral health barriers. He talked about how what we need in mental health right now is movement and finding all the different ways to move on to get to where we need to be so outcomes are transformed and the stigma on mental illness is changed.

Cornell Tech’s Behavioral Health Next Summit was an inspiring and productive convening of the healthcare and technology industries, which also shone a necessary and vital light on the work being accomplished together by integrating tech and behavioral health.

Liana Began is Marketing Manager at Cornell Tech.

The post Mental Health and Technology Converge at Cornell Tech Summit appeared first on Cornell Tech.

How do New Yorkers react to robots that approach them in public looking for trash? Surprisingly well, actually.

Cornell researchers built and remotely controlled two trash barrel robots – one for landfill waste and one for recycling – at a plaza in Manhattan to see how people would respond to the seemingly autonomous robots. Most people welcomed them and happily gave them trash, though a minority found them to be creepy. The researchers now have plans to see how other communities behave. If you’re a resident of New York City, these trash barrel robots may be coming soon to a borough near you.

A team led by Wendy Ju, associate professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion, and a member of the Department of Information Science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, constructed the robots from a blue or gray barrel mounted on recycled hoverboard parts. They equipped the robots with a 360-degree camera and operated them using a joystick.

“The robots drew significant attention, promoting interactions with the systems and among members of the public,” said co-author Frank Bu, a doctoral student in the field of computer science. “Strangers even instigated conversations about the robots and their implications.”

Bu and Ilan Mandel, a doctoral student in the field of information science, presented the study, “Trash Barrel Robots in the City” in the video program at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction last month.

In the video footage and interviews, people expressed appreciation for the service the robots provided and were happy to help move them when they got stuck, or to clear away chairs and other obstacles. Some people summoned the robot when they had trash – waving it like a treat for a dog – and others felt compelled to “feed” the robots waste when they approached.

However, several people voiced concerns about the cameras and public surveillance. Some raised middle fingers to the robots and one person even knocked one over.

People tended to assume that the robots were “buddies” who were working together, and some expected them to race each other for the trash. As a result, some people threw their trash into the wrong barrel.

Researchers call this type of research, in which a robot appears autonomous but people are controlling it from behind the scenes, a Wizard of Oz experiment. It’s helpful during prototype development because it can flag potential problems robots are likely to encounter when interacting with humans in the wild.

Ju had previously deployed a trash barrel robot on the Stanford University campus, where people had similarly positive interactions. In New York City, initially she had envisioned new types of mobile furniture, such as chairs and coffee tables.

“When we shared with them the trash barrel videos that we had done at Stanford, all discussions of the chairs and tables were suddenly off the table,” Ju said. “It’s New York! Trash is a huge problem!”

Now, Ju and her team are expanding their study to encompass other parts of the city. “Everyone is sure that their neighborhood behaves very differently,” Ju said. “So, the next thing that we’re hoping to do is a five boroughs trash barrel robot study.” Michael Samuelian, director of the Urban Tech hub at Cornell Tech, has helped the team to make contact with key partners throughout the city for the next phase of the project.

Doctoral student Wen-Ying “Rei” Lee also contributed to the study.

Patricia Waldron is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

This story originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.

The post (Almost) Everyone Likes a Helpful Trash Robot appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Hospitals have begun using “decision support tools” powered by artificial intelligence that can diagnose disease, suggest treatment or predict a surgery’s outcome. But no algorithm is correct all the time, so how do doctors know when to trust the AI’s recommendation?

A new study led by Qian Yang, assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, suggests that if AI tools can counsel the doctor like a colleague – pointing out relevant biomedical research that supports the decision – then doctors can better weigh the merits of the recommendation.

The researchers will present the new study, “Harnessing Biomedical Literature to Calibrate Clinicians’ Trust in AI Decision Support Systems,” in April at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Previously, most AI researchers have tried to help doctors evaluate suggestions from decision support tools by explaining how the underlying algorithm works, or what data was used to train the AI. But an education in how AI makes its predictions wasn’t sufficient, Yang said. Many doctors wanted to know if the tool had been validated in clinical trials, which typically does not happen with these tools.

“A doctor’s primary job is not to learn how AI works,” Yang said. “If we can build systems that help validate AI suggestions based on clinical trial results and journal articles, which are trustworthy information for doctors, then we can help them understand whether the AI is likely to be right or wrong for each specific case.”

To develop this system, the researchers first interviewed nine doctors across a range of specialties, and three clinical librarians. They discovered that when doctors disagree on the right course of action, they track down results from relevant biomedical research and case studies, taking into account the quality of each study and how closely it applies to the case at hand.

Yang and her colleagues built a prototype of their clinical decision tool that mimics this process by presenting biomedical evidence alongside the AI’s recommendation. They used GPT-3 to find and summarize relevant research. (ChatGPT is the better-known offshoot of GPT-3, which is tailored for human dialogue.)

“We built a system that basically tries to recreate the interpersonal communication that we observed when the doctors give suggestions to each other, and fetches the same kind of evidence from clinical literature to support the AI’s suggestion,” Yang said.

The interface for the decision support tool lists patient information, medical history and lab test results on one side, with the AI’s personalized diagnosis or treatment suggestion on the other, followed by relevant biomedical studies. In response to doctor feedback, the researchers added a short summary for each study, highlighting details of the patient population, the medical intervention and the patient outcomes, so doctors can quickly absorb the most important information.

The research team developed prototype decision support tools for three specialities – neurology, psychiatry and palliative care – and asked three doctors from each speciality to test out the prototype by evaluating sample cases.

In interviews, doctors said they appreciated the clinical evidence, finding it intuitive and easy to understand, and preferred it to an explanation of the AI’s inner workings.

“It’s a highly generalizable method,” Yang said. This type of approach could work for all medical specialties and other applications where scientific evidence is needed, such as Q&A platforms to answer patient questions or even automated fact checking of health-related news stories. “I would hope to see it embedded in different kinds of AI systems that are being developed, so we can make them useful for clinical practice.”

Co-authors on the study include doctoral students Yiran Zhao and Stephen Yang in the field of information science, and Yuexing Hao in the field of human behavior design. Volodymyr Kuleshov, assistant professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in computer science in Cornell Bowers CIS, Fei Wang, associate professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Kexin Quan of the University of California, San Diego also contributed to the study.

The researchers received support from the AI2050 Early Career Fellowship and the Cornell and Weill Cornell Medicine’s Multi-Investigator Seed Grants.

Patricia Waldron is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

This story originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.

The post AI Tool Gains Doctors’ Trust by Giving Advice Like a Colleague appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Asthma is personal for Tyler Bershad.

“Like 26 million Americans, I have asthma,” said Bershad, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA candidate, during the 2023 Health Hackathon in February. “Asthma is the most prevalent chronic respiratory disease in humans and, unfortunately, those who are most vulnerable are children.”

Bershad knows first-hand the reality that many pediatric asthma patients don’t always know how to communicate their symptoms to their parents or providers. This problem led him and his Hackathon team — named “Mixed Bag” — to create an innovative solution in the form of AiroCare, a smart monitoring device for asthmatic symptoms. It attaches directly to a nebulizer, collecting data on lung performance in real-time before sending it to an app that a physician can easily access. Mixed Bag presented AiroCare to a panel of judges during the Hackathon, winning the $2,000 grand prize.

The annual Health Hackathon, held in person Feb. 17-19 and organized by Weill Cornell Medicine’s Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC), brought together 136 student participants and 37 mentors from the Cornell ecosystem — including Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell Tech, and the Ithaca campus — as well as the wider New York metropolitan area, such as Hospital for Special Surgery, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and others. Mentors from Johnson & Johnson and biotechnology companies were available to coach the teams throughout the weekend. Even local high school student innovators participated.

“The Clinical and Translational Science Center has been involved in these activities for years with Cornell’s Ithaca campus,” said Dr. Julianne Imperato-McGinley, the CTSC’s Founding Director. “This multidisciplinary team activity is unique in that it sparks creativity,  innovation, and disruption. We want participants to collaborate and to think outside the box.”

Over the course of three days, medical, business, engineering, and design students convened in spaces spread throughout two floors of NextJump’s interdisciplinary workspace in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood to create solutions to some of today’s most pressing needs in human health and wellness.

On Feb. 17, they formed teams and hashed out ideas, then met with mentors the following day, receiving intensive feedback and guidance.

By Feb. 19, the event culminated in a day-long project showcase to an audience of peers, mentors, and sponsors. As the participants hurtled through the fast-paced, whirlwind of a weekend, there was time to connect with and learn from people whose points of view might not be like their own. There were times set aside for restorative yoga, fitness, and making new friends.

To hone the technical skills that would be needed for many of the projects, the participants learned rapid ideation, prototyping, and 3D printing by way of a pop-up MakerSpace.

Event coordinator My Linh H. Nguyen-Novotny, Assistant Director of Programmatic Development at the CTSC, said the event is unlike any other.

“At Friday evening’s kick-off, my advice to the participants was to meet someone new,” she said. “What’s special about the Hackathons are the people. Without the people, this is just a room with four walls. Later on, many of the participants confided how much they appreciated that the Health Hackathon is the rare opportunity where individuals from across Cornell’s campuses, who have diverse backgrounds, have to interact in an intentional and engaging way.”

Nguyen-Novotny added that the event was particularly meaningful given that it was the first Health Hackathon post-pandemic that the CTSC has been part of since February 2020.

“It demonstrates remarkable entrepreneurial drive; the creativity of our community coming together to find innovative, cross-disciplinary, inclusive solutions to improve the health outcomes for vulnerable populations,” she added.

The teams presented projects that included helping asthmatic children, devising solutions for teenagers with vaping addiction, seniors who feel isolated, women post-mastectomy, and uninsured individuals. Each project addressed what are some of the most enduring health challenges in society that have often been under-addressed.

Nguyen-Novotny said the participants revealed the great potential of “emerging technologies” — think machine learning, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, miRNA, 3D printing, and on-demand digital fabrication — to solve these problems.

Beyond Mixed Bag, the winning teams were:

• 1st Place for Evidence-Based Solution ($1,500): S-cubed
• Most Inclusive Solution ($1,000): AuthenZ
• Best Research-Backed Impact ($500): Big Red Cures
• Honorable Mention for Addressing a Public Health Need: Connected Dot
• Honorable Mention for Tackling Youth Epidemic: Lagged
• Honorable Mention for Best Pivots: Yes, And

The big challenge for all of these teams was to distill their solutions to very complex problems in just four minutes. That’s how long they had to pitch their projects, followed by a four-minute Q&A session from the judges’ panel. On the final day of the competition, all teams presented during a morning session, before the finalists who received the judges’ highest scores presented their work for the final demonstrations.

Ami Stuart, Tech Events Manager at Entrepreneurship at Cornell who organizes hackathons across Cornell, said it really spoke to the “caliber and reputation” of the event that students from not just Columbia, Parsons, and NYU participated, but those from as far as Philadelphia, Boston, and Hartford traveled to New York City to be a part of the weekend.

When reflecting on the hackathon, Mariia Dobko, one of the members of Mixed Bag and a Jacobs Technion-Cornell Dual MS Degree — Health Tech Concentration student, said that winning the grand prize “was a truly unforgettable experience.” She said the sleepless hours of hard work and dedication were successful due to the fact their team came from such “different backgrounds and diverse skills.”

“Although I have participated in hackathons before, I have never tried to combine so many different parts,” she said. “It was amazing to see how it came together at the end.”

The post Student Teams Tackle Pressing Health Concerns During Health Hackathon appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Nicola Dell, associate professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, has received the 2023 Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Societal Impact Award.

One of three awardees, Dell was recognized for leveraging research in human-computer interaction (HCI) for the greater good: her work improves computer security and privacy for victims of intimate partner violence, strengthens digital privacy in non-Western contexts, and guides the development of technology that supports home health care workers.

Together with colleague Thomas Ristenpart, professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS, Dell founded the Clinic to End Tech Abuse (CETA), which provides free tech support for survivors of intimate partner violence. CETA is embedded within the Family Justice Center social support system run by the New York City Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence.

“I’m truly honored to receive the SIGCHI Societal Impact Award and am grateful for the amazing collaborators, students, postdocs, and research partners who make my work possible,” Dell said. “This award is a wonderful recognition of our research team’s hard work and accomplishments over the last few years.”

Dell’s research spans HCI and Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), which explores how technology can assist underserved communities. Specifically, her work focuses on designing, building, and evaluating computer systems for underserved populations in low-income areas around the world.

Her research has been published widely in journals including the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, JAMA Internal Medicine, and Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, and has received several awards at premier conferences including ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), and the USENIX Security Symposium, among others.

Among her many honors and recognitions, Dell received a Google Award for Inclusion Research in 2022, a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2018, and two Google Faculty Research Awards in 2020 and 2018.

Dell earned master’s and doctoral degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2011 and 2015, respectively. At Cornell, she is a member of the Center for Health Equity, the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

Louis DiPietro is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

The post Human Computer Interaction Scholar Receives Societal Impact Award appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Personal sensing data could help monitor and alleviate stress among resident physicians, although privacy concerns over who sees the information and for what purposes must be addressed, according to collaborative research from Cornell Tech.

Burnout in all types of workplaces is on the rise in the U.S., where the “Great Resignation” and “silent quitting” have entered the lexicon in recent years. This is especially true in the health care industry, which has been strained beyond measure due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stress is physical as well as mental, and evidence of stress can be measured through the use of smartphones, wearables and personal computers. But data collection and analysis – and the larger questions of who should have access to that information, and for what purpose – raise myriad sociotechnical questions.

“We’ve looked at whether we can measure stress in workplaces using these types of devices, but do these individuals actually want this kind of system? That was the motivation for us to talk to those actual workers,” said Daniel Adler, co-lead author with fellow doctoral student Emily Tseng of “Burnout and the Quantified Workplace: Tensions Around Personal Sensing Interventions for Stress in Resident Physicians,” published Nov. 11 Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.

The paper is being presented at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Social Computing, taking place virtually Nov. 8-22.

Adler and Tseng worked with senior author Tanzeem Choudhury, the Roger and Joelle Burnell Professor in Integrated Health and Technology at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Contributors came from Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell Health and Zucker Hillside Hospital.

The resident physician’s work environment is a bit different from the traditional apprenticeship situation in that their supervisor, the attending physician, is also their mentor. That can blur the lines between the two.

“That’s a new context,” Tseng said. “We don’t really know what the actual boundaries are there, or what it looks like when you introduce these new technologies, either. So you need to try and decide what those norms might be to determine whether this information flow is appropriate in the first place.”

Choudhury and her group addressed these issues through a study involving resident physicians at an urban hospital in New York City. After hourlong interviews with residents on Zoom, the residents and their attendings were given mockups of a Resident Wellbeing Tracker, a dashboard with behavioral data on residents’ sleep, activity and time working; self-reported data on residents’ levels of burnout; and a text box where residents could characterize their well-being.

Tseng said the residents were open to the idea of using technology to enhance well-being. “They were also very interested in the privacy question,” she said, “and how we could use technologies like this to achieve those positive ends while still balancing privacy concerns.”

The study featured two intersecting use cases: self-reflection, in which the residents view their behavioral data, and data sharing, in which the same information is shared with their attendings and program directors for purposes of intervention.

Among the key findings: Residents were hesitant to share their data without the assurance that supervisors would use it to enhance their well-being. There is also a question of anonymity, which was more likely with more participation. But greater participation would hurt the potential usefulness of the program, since supervisors would not be able to identify which residents were struggling.

“This process of sharing personal data is somewhat complicated,” Adler said. “There is a lot of interesting continuing work that we’re involved in that looks at this question of privacy, and how you present yourself through your data in more-traditional mental health care settings. It’s not as simple as, ‘They’re my doctor, therefore I’m comfortable sharing this data.’”

The authors conclude by referring to the “urgent need for further work establishing new norms around data-driven workplace well-being management solutions that better center workers’ needs, and provide protections for the workers they intend to support.”

Other contributors included Emanuel Moss, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell Tech; David Mohr, a professor in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University; as well as Dr. John Kane, Dr. John Young and Dr. Khatiya Moon from Zucker Hillside Hospital.

The research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation and the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech.

This story originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.

The post Personal Sensing at Work: Tracking Burnout, Balancing Privacy appeared first on Cornell Tech.