At Cornell Tech, Thomas will work closely with and report to Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech Greg Morrisett, exploring strategic growth efforts for business programs at the Cornell Tech campus.

“Cornell Tech looks forward to working closely with Professor Thomas in his new role as Associate Dean of NYC Initiatives,” said Dean Morrisett. “His leadership will enhance the strategic opportunities presented by Cornell Tech’s unique mission and its partnership with Cornell’s SC Johnson College of Business.”

“I am delighted to be involved in this initiative to increase Cornell’s footprint in New York City,” said Professor Thomas. “Cornell has some unique strengths that can galvanize business education in NYC—the breadth of business programs at SC Johnson College of Business ranging from data science to hospitality, the advances in AI at Cornell Tech, and our deep-seated commitment to work for the greater good.”

In addition to this new role, Thomas will continue to serve as Senior Director of Programs for the Johnson School with responsibility for the EMBA programs and the Johnson Cornell Tech MBA program.

Johnson School Dean Vishal Guar noted, “This important strategic role will prepare us well for the future. Our EMBA programs are largely NYC-based. Thus, locating this position in New York is very beneficial for those programs and will help strengthen our JCT Program, which, at nearly 10 years old, is positioned to enter the next stage of maturity. In addition, this will add to our faculty presence in New York.”

For the SC Johnson College of Business, Thomas will serve as a member of the College Leadership Team reporting to Charles Field Knight Dean Andrew Karolyi, with responsibility for leading the college’s strategic vision and execution for NYC-based executive education, co-curricular programming, faculty growth, and related activities.

“I am thrilled to have an exceptional scholar and academic leader in Professor ManojThomas take on this vital role for Cornell University,” said Dean Karolyi. “The SC Johnson College of Business continues to partner closely with Cornell Tech building on existing programs and exploring new opportunities in NYC to pursue our shared mission.”

The post Manoj Thomas Named Associate Dean of NYC Initiatives 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.

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.

The post Advocating for Equitable Employment: Khemi Cooper, MBA ’18 appeared first on Cornell Tech.

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.”

The post The Software Engineer Who Became a Business Leader: Adebisi Oje, MBA ‘16 appeared first on Cornell Tech.

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.

What is your favorite class this semester?

My favorite class is probably Startup Studio since it’s most reflective of the product management career I’m pursuing. It provides the unique opportunity to combine theory with practice. So, I’m gaining experience building products in an incubator-like environment while reinforcing that experience by also building skills through academic instruction. 

What excites you most about your program?

I love that I can take tried and tested business courses, like Financial Statement Analysis and Management Presentations; as well as leading-edge tech courses, like Startup Studio, Introduction to Blockchains, Cryptocurrencies, and Smart Contracts, and Fundamentals of Modern Software within the same degree. For me, the ability to integrate these academic worlds is the beauty of the Cornell Tech MBA. It’s also extremely beneficial to be surrounded by peers (engineers, designers, other MBAs) who are focused on technology. A lot of synergies and latent learning occur in this environment where everyone brings a tech-oriented background and career path.

Why did you choose Cornell Tech?

The uniqueness of the curriculum, culture, and community. I explored other graduate business programs, many of which seemed to offer great opportunities in Tech, but none were as explicitly focused on tech as Cornell Tech. Ultimately, this program stood out to me as the most efficient way to accelerate my trajectory in the industry.

What has surprised you most about Cornell Tech?

The amount of work! While I fully expected an institution of Cornell’s standing to demand a lot (I wouldn’t have it any other way) the experience has been, in some respects, an exercise in prioritization. To be successful, I’ve had to thoughtfully consider exactly what I’m here to learn. In one year, there simply isn’t enough time to do it all (even if you find almost everything intellectually appealing).

What’s the most interesting use of technology you’ve seen lately?

The rapid development and deployment of big data tools to track COVID-19 have been pretty cool to see and use. The scale at which it’s taking place, and the collaboration that it requires across governments, academia, the open source community, and private businesses is remarkable. Many times in the past, tech has excelled at uniting these forces to make progress — it’s great to see a more recent example of that collaborative effort. The New York Times’ Covid tracking project is a great example. There are so many disparate contributors to that effort, and it’s obviously delivering a very important service. 

What is one of your favorite things to do on the weekend in NYC?

Leave the apartment, get on the subway with no real agenda, and see where the day takes me. Maybe I’ll call friends to meet up along the way and we end up in a park with street food. Maybe I run into someone unexpected and we grab a drink. Also, I love walking and listening to music. Before the pandemic, I saw a lot of live music on weekends — but with good headphones, a walk, and a musical itch to scratch I’m pretty happy. For a quick break, I really enjoy going for runs around Roosevelt Island with classmates.

In what way do you hope your work might affect others and society at large? 

Regardless of where a tech company lies on the spectrum between pure commercial entity and social enterprise, I think by building things that solve problems, and not believing “the status quo is fine with me,” tech companies inherently contribute to progress. I acknowledge that society’s relationship with technology must be continuously redefined, as we often can’t foresee the societal impacts that innovation brings. But by and large, I believe technology solves problems. As long as I’m making an earnest contribution to that effort, I’ll be happy knowing I’m moving the world forward.

The post Master’s Q&A: Scott Hillman, MBA ’21 appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Algorithmic streaming recommendations can be quite useful when seeking artists similar to those you already listen to, but using those generated playlists to discover a wide range of new content can be difficult. What if you wanted to listen to what your friends were listening to, but they all have different music tastes from your own? If you can’t remember their favorite band or song’s name, you’ll be out of luck.

Four Cornell Tech students jumped at the chance to innovate when they noticed this lack of diversity and social connection. Wishing that there was an easy in-app way to share what they were listening to with friends, the team came together to design a potential new feature: Spotify Groups.

How it began

Chan Baik and Shuhan Zhang, both Johnson Cornell Tech MBAs ‘20,  Bobo Liu and Jae Min Cha, Masters of Engineering in Computer Science ‘20, and Max Klein and Rebecca Gill-Clarke, students from the Parsons School of Design, were matched up with Spotify during their BigCo Studio course where students learn how to innovate within a large company. “It was exciting to get Spotify since we already use it and had many different ideas,” said Zhang.

To start, the team gathered input from a diverse group of regular Spotify users on any problems or limitations they encountered while using the platform. “There is already a huge built-in user base getting on to listen to music. There wasn’t a need for extensive research to capture a niche market,” said Liu.

After speaking to various users, the team realized they had to stay focused on one stand-out idea, which was to help users find more diverse content through their friends. “Our interviews with users showed that they didn’t always necessarily want Spotify’s recommendations on what to listen to. They said they’d like to have an additional collaborative feature to share music among friends,” said Zhang.

Together with Spotify stakeholders, the team assessed various solutions alongside Spotify’s business objectives: the number of monthly active users, strategic importance, and new user growth potential, as well as the idea’s long-term technical scalability and feasibility. After brainstorming some ideas, the team decided on integrating a ‘Groups’ feature into the Spotify interface.

An interactive environment

The idea of Spotify Groups is to offer users a social and collaborative environment, similar to those on other popular social media platforms, to drive music and podcast discovery based on the tastes of their friends and family. A user can aggregate a curated slate of content for others or open it up for collaboration, somewhat akin to the way playlists are created on the platform. Users can also know what their friends are listening to, and more easily share their favorites as well.

With this idea in mind, the team worked with advisors from Spotify to chart out the potential places to display Spotify Groups in-app. Klein and Gill-Clarke helped visually design the team’s ideas, all while integrating them within Spotify’s brand, design specs, and internal framework. “We were lucky with our designers Max and Rebecca — they were very detail-oriented, even down to the pixels,” said Baik.

If implemented, the feature will be situated next to other toggle options on Spotify, such as ‘Music,’ and ‘Podcasts.’ Clicking on ‘Groups’ will populate the feature offerings in a way that becomes more individualized the more a user curates and creates preferences and friend circles. 

It will also introduce interactivity for users, both between other users and with the content offered on the platform.

Going forward, what’s next?

“BigCo Studio gave us good tips on how to efficiently interact with very busy company advisors. That, as well as our team members, is what made us succeed with the project. And the good news is that the nature of BigCo projects is that no one owns the idea, it is public,” said Zhang. Since the project is open-source, a dedicated person or team at Spotify can work on building the project uninhibited by high costs or holdouts based on ownership.

A workable version of Spotify Groups could be in the hands of users soon. “There were talks about offering this as an intern project, but we have to wait and see. Hopefully, they make it in the near future. We’d all use it ourselves,” said Liu.

The post Cornell Tech Students Work To Make Spotify More Social appeared first on Cornell Tech.

From the museum to the marketplace

OnePlace aims to help families prepare for life events with the tools and guidance they need to keep track of their most important documents in “one place.” Chief Product Officer Sunny Ladkani, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ‘20, said that along with safe and secure document storage, the platform will initially focus on the gathering of life’s most important documents — they expect to see private essentials like passports, wills, insurance, healthcare, identification cards, and more in digital form. The interface will be instructive and visual to help users know what they need.

The OnePlace vision takes a long-term approach — looking at where society is going to be rather than where it is now. The team envisions OnePlace as the technological dwelling of information not just years down the line, but entire generations and more. The goal is to aid with familial collaboration in organizing and storing the paramount data for the entire family, with eyes fixed toward what will be helpful to have on hand for the future.

The inventiveness and work that followed resulted in the newly graduated foursome receiving co-working space on the Cornell Tech campus for the team to pursue their startup.

Solving shared problems collectively

Asper, Ladkani, and their fellow co-founders, CEO Yasmin Lalani, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ‘20, and Chief Design Officer Ryan Kim, Master of Engineering in Computer Science ‘20, each encountered their own difficulties as they left home as adults. Daniel, Sunny, and Yasmin all graduated the MBA program and met last summer in Ithaca, while Ryan joined the crew in NYC after he and Daniel immediately clicked in an AR/VR class. “We all complement each other very well — we are each confident in our different ideas, qualities, and skills,” said Ladkani. 

“Our idea affects me personally — I’m Korean, so my family lives overseas,” said Kim. “We always had a problem keeping track of documents and other things, so when Daniel came to me, the idea jived with me. So, I bring my personal skills and passion into this.”

“Similar to Ryan, I have a spread-out family,” said Lalani. “My dad once gave me an elaborate printout — kind of a treasure hunt — which clued us to his bank account password. Then in a bathroom cabinet, there’s a key to a safety deposit box in New Jersey. As much as I’d like to think I’m the type of person to remember all that amid panic and confusion, it’s stressful to think that if something happened I wouldn’t be able to find all the important stuff.”

These stressors led the team to seek confirmation that the difficulties were widespread. After confirming these same problems in their peer group, they started conducting user interviews for those who would use the product. “We wanted to both build a product and create something meaningful and powerful to solve these problems,” said Asper. “We first worked with our own families to develop the concept and product. It allowed us to go deep into what the product needs to look like.” Like Asper’s day at the museum, OnePlace will showcase the uniting importance of small groups on a practical and emotional level. “We liked the idea and felt that even in the worst-case scenario, we’d build it for our four families. So I was on board with that,” said Lalani.

The slow roll-out toward a long-term solution

The intended business model will be priced as either a monthly or annual fee that will be lower than the price of a streaming service to store the information on the platform. The OnePlace team said they would welcome corporate partnerships, but will not sell user data to third parties, and only anticipate using data from the platform to make it more functional and beneficial for users. 

They are avoiding a traditional marketing campaign, opting instead for a focus on building out the product and paying close attention to the concerns of beta users. The team wants the product to be refined before scaling out too quickly. “We are always wanting to listen to customers and won’t stop doing that,” said Asper. “We don’t want to lose touch with them. Adaptations will have to be made, so we are building it to be flexible, thoughtful of how it can change, and building it so that a person in your family in 100 years will benefit from it.”

OnePlace seeks to bring the type of reconvergence of the important information families rely on both now and into the future, toward the yet-to-be-born generation who will reap the benefits of what is placed in the digital rucksack of OnePlace.

The post OnePlace: A Central Gathering Hub for Families appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Smart locks allowed access to Liebel’s apartment, but not to the front door of the building. He found some creative solutions: hiding keys in the cracks of the sidewalk, leaving them at his local grocery store, even attaching them to padlocks. None worked out. 

Liebel joined the MBA program at Cornell Tech with one clear aim: to build a technological solution to this problem. Now, Buzr — the product he developed with co-founder Jeremy Walker, Master in Electrical and Computer Engineering ’20 — is a recipient of a 2020 Cornell Tech Startup Award.

Talk. Listen. Buzz. Anywhere. 

Buzr easily connects your smartphone to your existing intercom system and allows you to control the front door of your apartment block remotely. A notification on the Buzr app informs the user when someone rings the doorbell. You can then talk, listen, and open the door from anywhere in the world. Or as Liebel pointed out, “Even if you’re just on your couch and you don’t want to get up to let the pizza guy in.”

Buzr’s virtual key functionality gives friends, family, and service providers front door access at user-defined times, and Airbnb hosts can offer guest access. “Buzr empowers anybody that lives in an old building to have modern entry functionality,” said Liebel.

Liebel started working on his idea in 2016 but came to Cornell Tech to make it happen. “I can’t think of a more entrepreneurial place,” he said. “I needed a rockstar like Jeremy to help me out.” Walker’s background is in electrical engineering and industrial design — the exact skillset that Liebel needed.

The pair found that other tech solutions offer remote door control but their installation is destructive, as the entire system needs to be replaced and wires have to be pulled from the building. Buzr takes a different approach. “We upgrade the ability of the existing system at the endpoint,” explained Liebel. This allows building owners or those that live in the apartments themselves to upgrade their building in a less destructive way. Liebel says “we’re aiming to be as easy to install as a Nest Thermostat.”

At a basic level, Buzr is a WiFi-connected set of switches with audio and a battery. It replaces the existing intercom station inside an apartment non-destructively. The old unit is removed from the wall and then Buzr is installed on that footprint. The new system’s circuitry transfers signals via the existing wires without physically damaging them, explained Liebel. “There’s an isolation circuit between those wires and our device; we’re able to get out signals through that gap.”

Legacy intercom stations can be over 90 years old and they come in many shapes and sizes. Liebel and Walker identified over 180 types and tied down the core technologies deployed. Via online research and lab testing, they have produced a solution that is universal and designed for self-install. As the robustness of power supply in old intercom stations is variable, the pair opted for a long-life battery-powered solution.

Next Steps for Buzr

The Cornell Tech Startup Award provides the Buzr team with pre-seed funding and co-working space at the Tata Innovation Center. Liebel and Walker are now working on production models for profitability and low-cost manufacturing, robustness and universality testing, and new app features.

One priority is Buzr’s integration with delivery services. “When Amazon delivers your package, our system will know that you’re expecting the package. They scan the package and then the door automatically will open for them,” said Liebel.

Buzr’s pre-launch campaign aims to raise the next round of capital and build customer engagement. The pair are also actively hiring. “We are looking for computer science backgrounds that have experience in IoT and we’re also looking for design and marketing partners,” Liebel explained.

As Liebel and Walker’s award-winning startup grows, so too does the buzz around Buzr.

The post Alumni Startup Lets You Control Access to Your Apartment From Anywhere appeared first on Cornell Tech.

As medical professionals around the world face the uncharted waters of a global health crisis, enroute has found a way to make hospitals’ simultaneously over-capacity and under-resourced hallways easier to navigate.

Getting Hospital Transportation Systems on the Right Track

Described by Kosnik as the “Uber of intra-hospital transportation,” enroute provides full visibility of how patients, personnel, and equipment move throughout the hospital in real-time through an app-based platform that integrates into a hospital’s existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Then, using specialized algorithms, enroute automatically assigns transporters to equipment and patients, culminating in a smooth, trackable process.

Given the impact enroute can have in creating a more efficient global health ecosystem, it’s fitting that the startup was first conceptualized during a 24-hour, international hackathon. Aptly called Time to Care, the public health-themed hackathon was hosted by the American-Israeli startup MindState and backed by the World Health Organization. The hackathon was part of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute‘s annual iTrek program, a 10-day trip during the January academic recess which provides students of varying backgrounds an opportunity to be exposed to and learn about the growing economy of innovation in Israel with a focus on the established startup ecosystem.

Kosnik and Schirmer were paired with five other teammates — including multinational students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, as well as working professionals in the biomedical engineering and product design space — and told to come up with a product after observing the movement of 1,400 patients as they traveled through Ichilov Hospital, part of Sourasky Medical Center’s 2.7 million-square-foot campus, over the course of a day. 

“There were communication and coordination issues that were leading to delays,” said Kosnik, who noted it took an average of 36 minutes to transport patients from one place to another. “These delays don’t just cost precious time with patients. Operations are basically the lifeblood of the hospital, and when there’s an issue with transportation it’s going to impact every department.” 

In order to move patients or equipment from place to place on hospital campuses, transporters must be given locations and dispatched efficiently. But according to Schirmer, many hospitals still rely on clipboards and other outdated systems that hamper efficiencies. When a patient has to be moved, say, from ER to Radiology with a broken arm, Schirmer noted a nurse must “make a request, call the dispatch office — which is a small room in the middle of the hospital that operates like a seventies-style dispatch service, each operator holding onto two phones at a time, all day every day.”

In fact, enroute Design Lead Tal Shturm recalled accidentally getting lost in a hospital a few years ago after a scheduled X-ray. “A nurse moved my bed to the hallway, and I was informed that a transporter will pick me up soon. So I waited, and waited,” and then after going to the front desk to check in on his transport status, he was told to keep waiting. “Finally, after almost two hours of waiting, a transporter who passed by noticed me, and casually asked: ‘Are you still here? I’ll take you back to the department.’ It was clear I was totally lost in the system.”

But the team emphasizes that this isn’t the fault of the transporters or hospital staff, who have made a life of helping patients. “It’s about the technology,” said Schirmer. “The IT is outdated.”

With enroute’s algorithms, hospitals could adjust transport priorities based upon urgency without losing track of patients with less-pressing needs. Rather than engendering the confusion of the previous model, enroute strives to create connectivity throughout the hospitals’ ecosystem. The system also provides practical transparency, so dispatchers have a constantly updating picture of staff workload, which could result in more efficient routes and decreased travel per shift.

Adapting to Address COVID-19

After winning the hackathon in January, enroute’s team members knew they wanted to keep working on the product and see if they could expand it from a concept to a viable company. Although Kosnik and Schirmer — enroute’s CEO and Chief Product Officer, respectively—were back in New York completing their last graduate program semester, they maintained communication with their Israeli teammates to expand and perfect its technology. 

But when COVID-19 began to dominate world healthcare weeks later, slamming hospitals that were already over-capacity and under-resourced, the team realized that enroute could help hospitals on a larger scale than they’d initially imagined.

“Originally we knew we were dealing with a bad problem, but with the pandemic, it became even worse — we heard about doctors having to wait six hours for patient transport,” said Kosnik, adding that their contacts at hospitals in the US and abroad “asked if we had something to keep track of patients because they were using clipboards to figure out which patients had COVID-19 and where they were held. They were figuring it out on the fly.”

This gave enroute a new perspective on how its algorithms could assist in the fight against coronavirus and other infectious diseases: its technology could track the locations and pathways of contagious and non-contagious patients and staff, and the equipment they require. The data would provide a comprehensive log on where patients infected with COVID-19 have been, and who has come into contact with them, including retroactive tracing in cases in which, for example, a patient who received treatment for a non-related ailment later tests positive for the virus.

The utility and success of this venture haven’t gone unnoticed. The startup was one of four student-led companies to win Cornell Tech’s 2020 Startup Awards in late May, which provides up to $100,000 in pre-seed funding plus access to an international array of tech industry leaders — many of whom immediately started messaging Kosnik and Schirmer while they were delivering their presentation during the awards’ livestream.

What’s Next?

Since graduating from the MBA program in May, Schirmer and Kosnik have been working at enroute full-time, and they have five other team members working on the product on a part-time basis.

“Right now we are building out the technology and plan to deploy a version 1.0 at hospitals this fall,” said Schirmer. In addition to bolstering their coding and focusing on software development, in the last month the team has also been in communication with hospitals spanning from Texas to Boston, Israel, and New York.

Considering that physical logistics have been calculated to account for upwards of 46% of a hospital’s total budget, enroute would free up resources that have already been tapped during the pandemic. And although they hope the international community won’t be hit by a second wave, enroute hopes to be operational by the end of the year to help — whether that assistance comes in the form of decreasing potential exposure to COVID-19 or making sure someone who broke a bone during a precarious quarantined-at-home DIY project gets to radiology and back without getting lost along the way.

The post How enroute Helps Patients and Doctors Navigate Hospitals’ Crowded Halls appeared first on Cornell Tech.