Cornell Tech believes that increasing diversity and practicing inclusion is key to improving technology—and people’s lives. Meet two dynamic executives and entrepreneurs who are helping the school to do just that.

Managing Entrepreneurial Officer at Cornell Tech and co-founder of early stage venture capital firm 645 Ventures Aaron Holiday has played a key role in helping launch Cornell Tech’s Startup Studio program in addition to promoting social responsibility on campus. Denise Young Smith, formerly the Chief Human Resources Officer and Vice President of Inclusion and Diversity at Apple, joined the Cornell Tech community as Executive-in-Residence in January 2018.

“I was working with Aaron and I thought: we’ve got two prominent African-American leaders and professionals now focusing on the Startup Studio program at Cornell Tech—this is unprecedented,” said Smith, who in addition to leading Apple’s Human Resources division, built their retail teams, and oversaw its global efforts to create a diverse and inclusive culture and workforce during her 20 years with the company. “It’s an incredible differentiator in and of itself when you have professionals and entrepreneurs who bring a diverse perspective to help influence and enhance this already world-class program. I hope our work here will not only add to the quality of the program but will say to existing and prospective students that Cornell Tech welcomes and embraces everyone’s perspective.”

What does Smith hope to accomplish at Cornell Tech? “My objective has been to help Cornell Tech fulfill its mission of being a premier institution where you not only experience diversity here in the community, but more importantly learn about its critical importance if you’re going into the world as an entrepreneur, technologist, or leader,” Smith said. “The objective is our students will have learned in their experience here that being diverse and inclusive is non-negotiable in the world we live in today and tomorrow.”

In Smith’s view, it’s not only important to value diversity for its own sake, but also to have a keen understanding of why it’s so crucial in tech. “The world is rapidly changing,” she said. “[Diversity] is important in the critical niches of technology because tech has to keep up with and lead in this rapidly changing world.”

Holiday, too, wants to ensure that Cornell Tech students understand why it’s so urgent for the tech world to recruit diverse talent and promote inclusive leadership. Having studied computer science as an undergraduate, he knows it is a “hyper-collaborative” field in which “it’s almost impossible to keep up with the content” via self-study alone. Diversity is key, he said, because “you need to have inclusion of all people to grasp the content and learn and grow.”

In a world where “software and engineering have become the primary mechanism to invent and create new things,” Holiday said, “in order for people of color and women to be able to participate in the creation of the new world, we need more women and people of color building things, so that everybody is a part of building the new world.”

Because Holiday believes that diversity is “not only a matter of gender and race but also of skill sets,” he encourages students to consider whether a team has the right ratio of engineers, MBAs, and people with legal expertise and advises them to ask, “What will a person contribute to a team based on their total experience?”

Smith also seeks to instill in students the idea that by increasing representation, they can gain valuable perspectives that will enhance their project, product, or company.

Smith and Holiday have invited other prominent figures to the campus to enrich the studio experience and add perspective. Dionna McPhatter, a West Point graduate and data scientist, has visited the Studio several times. 

There are, said Smith, “many different examples every day in the commercial world” of how expanding our understanding of the “inclusion imperative” as she phrases it with staff at Cornell Tech, has improved technology and its effectiveness. In her view, tech leaders should ask, “How dated is this item or concept against a dynamically changing world demographic? Who designed it? And how does it need to evolve now?” So many common products that people use every day—“toys, cosmetics, emoticons,” to name only a few—need updating, she said, and the people who use those products need representation.

Like Holiday, Smith wants to ensure that the brave new world we are building doesn’t replicate and reinforce old biases. “Everyone is talking about AI,” she said, “but if we aren’t extremely urgent and deliberate about who is in the room when we design code for the challenges of the future, we are going to come up with ineffective and limited products. How are we deciding who is getting loans with banks? Or who should be screened in and screened out with new security systems?”

After all, Smith said, “there’s nothing terribly artificial about AI. It’s coming from the minds of human beings and it will replicate human biases.”

The flip side of this risk, according to both Smith and Holiday, is that making sure a wide variety of people are represented when launching a new product or company can improve the product and expand its customer base. It can mean significantly enhanced success for a company.

The post Visionary Leaders Work to Expand Diversity & Inclusion at Cornell Tech appeared first on Cornell Tech.

New technologies are now faster, cheaper, and easier to develop than ever before. But such rapid and often unchecked innovation can sometimes lead to harmful outcomes.

For Frederic Rubinstein ’52, LLB ’55, “The right kind of entrepreneurship and technology should make a significant positive contribution to improving life on our planet.”

Having devoted a substantial portion of his legal career to startup and technology companies, Rubinstein is “enthused about Cornell’s aggressive entry into the tech arena.” He sees Cornell Tech’s diverse coalition of academics, students, and creators as a golden opportunity to address some of the biggest issues of the day, given that we live in “difficult times, culturally, politically, and economically.” Rubinstein wants to make it easier for students to transform their best ideas and most promising products and services into viable and socially responsible tech companies.

That’s why he and his wife Susan gave a $1-million gift to the campus to establish the Frederic and Susan Rubinstein Fund for Social Benefit in Entrepreneurial Programs. The Fund will support efforts to foster active and intelligent civic engagement by improving health and education—ambitious students will have more opportunities than ever to create socially impactful projects to make a real difference.

Rubinstein’s gift will help propel a widely shared ethos across campus.

Aaron Holiday, a Managing Entrepreneurial Officer who works closely with Cornell Tech spinout startups and the school’s Startup Studio program, shares the Rubinsteins’ commitment to promoting social responsibility in new tech. An ethic of social responsibility is, Holiday said, “critically important to the work that we do,” especially in a world where tech is embedded in every aspect of society and has an enormous impact on an ever-growing number of people.

“When we first started creating studio startups, just like everyone else, we were really excited about drones, virtual reality, blockchain, and cryptocurrency,” Holiday said. “But what has been most rewarding, and surprising, as a person who’s been involved in helping to build all of this, is students’ strong interest in purpose-driven companies.”

In recent years, Cornell Tech students have conceived of and launched products to make mobile phones more accessible to illiterate people, make speech therapy more accessible to children with speech impediments, and make it easier for special education teachers to track data that help improve outcomes for students with autism.

Holiday is particularly proud of how the Cornell Tech Startup Awards, which offer winning teams up to $100,000 in post-academic, pre-seed funding, have helped allow students who “might not traditionally have had an opportunity to build a company to have a swing at bat.”

In addition to creating opportunities for such students, Holiday said, questions about social entrepreneurship and social responsibility are embedded in the Startup Award application itself.

“We want students from the very beginning, at the earliest stages of a company’s formation, to think about social responsibility, diversity and inclusion, and the ethical impact of tech on the world,” Holiday said.

One such venture, Full Plate, is an online service designed to help low-income customers access nutritious, fully prepared meals. Co-founder Ryan Lupton, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’18, realized an entire customer segment was being overlooked by meal delivery services such as Blue Apron, Green Chef, and HelloFresh. “We wanted to understand how we could bring the same sort of convenience [provided by other meal delivery services], but also bring nutrition, and offer it at a price point that low-income customers and families could afford,” he said.

Co-founder Chris Stuart, a Parsons Design and Technology MFA student, agrees, and added, “My motivation to create Full Plate came in part from seeing how my family and the people of Puerto Rico were struggling even to get food on their plates after Hurricane Maria, let alone eat nutritiously. The name ‘Full Plate’ comes from my desire to help bring full, healthy meals to people’s tables.”

Although Full Plate is launching in New York City, Stuart would love to bring it to his home of Puerto Rico one day. “What’s important is that being part of a social entrepreneurship team we’re not measuring our success based solely in terms of what’s profitable,” he said. “Success for me and Ryan means that we’ve improved people’s lives. That’s how I define social entrepreneurship: we’re doing this for the social impact and to improve people’s health and better their everyday lives.”

Like Holiday, Lupton said much of the campus energy for socially conscious projects comes from the students themselves. “The idea and the importance of social entrepreneurship on Cornell Tech’s campus is really led by students who are, for the most part, digitally native,” he said. “And they have a clear vision for how they want technology to be used in a way that improves lives. That student-led initiative is a big piece of what I value about Cornell Tech.”

Both Lupton and Stuart are grateful for the opportunity to pour their energy and drive into socially conscious entrepreneurship. ”What I value most,” said Stuart, “is the opportunity to work with people from diverse backgrounds, meet all these people with all these different skills, and figure out how they can combine to make one amazing startup.”

The post How Cornell Tech Aims to Foster ‘the right kind of entrepreneurship’ appeared first on Cornell Tech.

This is among the core issues being explored at the Sept. 28-29 Speed Conference, hosted by Cornell Tech’s Digital Life Initiative (DLI), a cross-disciplinary and cross-campus program aimed at uniting students and scholars to analyze technology’s impact on society. Faculty from Cornell’s Ithaca and New York City campuses, as well as Stanford University, Columbia University, Northeastern University and other schools, will speak on panels examining the role of technology and speed in areas like content moderation, finance, warfare and policing, and labor and manufacturing.

“There’s a very strong sense that, in all the important ways of applying technology, everything’s going to be fine as long as we can insert a human in the loop,” said Helen Nissenbaum, Cornell Tech professor of information science, director of DLI and co-chair of the Speed Conference. “What we are worried about is that because humans and machines think and process at such enormously different speeds, this particular protection that we think we can build in is actually infeasible. And that raises all sorts of societal questions, ethical questions, legal questions and probably technical questions, too.”

Panelists at the Speed Conference will include Nissenbaum; conference co-chair James Grimmelmann, professor of law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School; Steven Jackson, associate professor of information science; and Wendy Ju, assistant professor of information science in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech.

“There’s a real mismatch between how fast computers operate and how fast people react,” Grimmelmann said. “We want to come collaboratively across fields to understand the place for humans to respond to this new challenge.”

The Speed Conference is one of the first major events from DLI, which launched in 2017. The initiative also holds a weekly seminar series at Cornell Tech, open to the public, focusing on the development and application of digital technology. A DLI doctoral fellowship began this semester, drawing students from across Cornell’s campuses. As the effort continues ramping up, Nissenbaum said she hopes DLI can support cross-disciplinary research projects on related topics, as well as additional classes.

“Our goal is not necessarily to question the activity of technological development – we’re not opposed to that – it’s more to raise awareness that tech can be developed in many different directions, and it can take many different shapes,” she said. “I think many people just accept technology and think it’s God-given, but they may not be aware that choices are made all along the way to shape the technology from the very beginning. Especially with students, I want them to be aware that every step of the way, from the beginning, you can integrate ethical and societal thinking.”

The Speed Conference is supported by Microsoft.

The post Fast and out of control? Conference examines the role of speed in tech appeared first on Cornell Tech.

This question fascinated Dr. Wendy Ju, who joined the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech as Assistant Professor of Information Science last year. Ju is setting up a robotics research lab for human-and-robot interaction, where she will seek how to design machines that can easily and naturally interact with humans.

Watching what humans do

Dr. Ju has a PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford and a master’s degree in media arts and sciences from MIT. She has spent years observing human interactions. “They’re basically very small conversations that enable everyday life: Who’s going to open the door? Who’s going to go in first or second? With cars we do it at four-way stops,” she said.

Watching what happens when things go wrong during these interactions can also be useful, she said. “I’m just a person that really likes to watch people. I really love looking at breakdowns, I like being in public places and seeing when these things get tripped up.”

Ju explained that machines do not automatically pick up cues that people use every day; rather, everything they do requires button pushing or explicit asking. Humans are constantly signaling to one another, so when a robot is added to the mix, how is it given the skills it needs to interact?

“I’m interested in that kind of interaction, knowing that is how people interact with one another, and thinking about what that means for how we design machines.”

According to Ju, these interactions are not always completely obvious to the people making robots because they work so invisibly that it’s not often noticed “I feel like I have an obligation, since I can see these things, to design the machines so that they work that way as well,” she said.

On the road with ghost drivers

One of Ju’s principal areas of research is autonomous cars. She’s carried out field experiments to see how people behave around them. To gauge these reactions, Ju and her team use what she calls “ghost drivers.” In light of a recent accident in Tempe, Arizona, where a woman was killed by an autonomous Uber car undergoing testing, Ju’s methods have particular significance. “We basically have a person dressed in a costume to look like a car seat driving on the road, and then we can do experiments to see how people react, but with the safety of an actual human controlling the car,” she said.

Through her work, Ju aims to answer specific questions about set scenarios. For example, how quickly will people react if a car hands control over to its passenger? What will people do when they encounter an autonomous car on the road? The results could be surprising. People tend to understand that autonomous cars and robots are learning, Ju said, and they often want to help. “People do different things to enforce norms about where the car’s supposed to be and when it’s supposed to stop,” she said.

Ju’s other work on robot-and-human interactions is focused on everyday situations. The machines she deploys are not actually autonomous, they’re controlled by people. The point is to try to anticipate how people might behave around robots in the future. How will they react to a robot collecting trash, cooking food, or running on the sidewalk?

Some people test the robots to see what they are capable of, while others try to help them. “If the robot plays dumb, if it doesn’t pick up a signal, people will do different things to really exaggerate what they’re doing, like wave the garbage or point at empty spaces,” Ju said. These, she said, are implicit cues which people amplify to teach the robot the correct way to do something.

By observing all of the different cues and behaviors, Ju can then incorporate them into machine-learning algorithms. This way, robots can learn from the natural things that humans do.

A new context in NYC

To date, Ju has carried out most of her experiments around Stanford. She has found that people there are pretty nonchalant when they encounter robots. “A lot of people are very pro-technology and they also work in technology so they’re very much like, ‘Oh yeah, this is happening now,’” she said.

Having recently moved to New York City, she is curious to find out whether people will behave differently or the same way. One of her first projects at Cornell Tech will explore how people interact with a troupe of chair robots -— essentially chairs that can reconfigure themselves in a space. She will also carry out further on-road experiments with ghost drivers.

Ju relishes the opportunity to continue her work in this new context. The diverse department at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute also really appealed to her. “There are so many people with shared interests in both technology and the social issues around that,” she said. The city played its part too, “New York City was a big draw because I’m so interested in observing people,” she said. “I’m working at the intersection of technology and design; New York City’s such a great place for that.”

The post Can Humans and Robots Interact Naturally? appeared first on Cornell Tech.

The negative health effects of poor sleep are well documented, said CEO and Startup Postdoc at Runway and Elisha M. Friedman Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Amir Reuveny. If you have a sleep disorder, your risk of developing diabetes can be up to three times higher than normal and the chance of having high blood pressure can be up to four times higher.

Further, sleep deprivation and disorders are estimated to cost the economy over $400 billion annually due to factors such as accidents and loss of productivity. And, of course, disturbed sleep can have a serious effect on a person’s emotional and personal life.

Perhaps most surprising, most people who suffer from sleep deprivation and sleep disorders are undiagnosed, “It was really staggering for us, why such a huge epidemic is left with so many underdiagnosed and untreated patients,” said Reuveny.

Reuveny, who studied imperceptible electronics and earned his PhD from Tokyo University, was drawn to the problem not least because of the sheer scale of it, but also for personal reasons: his own father, he said, hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in more than twenty years.

The other members of the team are: CTO, Ahud (Adi) Mordechai; data products consultant, Noam Schwartz; and sleep specialist, Stephanie Zandieh. They talked to dozens of sleep physicians and technicians in a bid to understand how the process and economics of sleep diagnostics currently work, then they set about improving things.

The existing diagnostic procedure is labor-intensive and expensive, making it inaccessible to many people. It is also cumbersome and unpleasant; sleep labs haven’t changed much since the 1970s, said Reuveny, “You sleep outside your house. You are wired to 10-20 different electrodes. People are watching you, monitoring you during the night.”

While home diagnostic tests are cheaper ($200 per night compared to $1,000-$5,000 in-lab) there is still a lot of friction in the process: waiting lists can be long, patients may damage the device or fail to return it to the clinic, or they may have difficulty assembling it at home.

“If you combine all things together, you understand that something doesn’t work properly in the way people diagnose and manage sleep disorders today and this is where we come into play,” said Reuveny.

A Seamless and Economic Solution

TATCH is a sleep diagnosis and monitoring patch that replaces bulky wired devices; the patent-pending, disposable product is both easy-to-use and cost-effective. To develop the prototype, the team focused on sleep apnea — the most common sleep test done in the United States today (3.5-4 million tests per year).

The one-use patch combines flexible electronics, machine learning and wearable technology to monitor diagnostic parameters for sleep apnea, such as sleep position and oxygen saturation levels.

“The patch has sensors and a communication module inside. All the signals are communicated from the patch to your smartphone securely and from the phone they are saved to the cloud. Then the clinic can easily pull the results of the test,” said Reuveny.

The patch is aimed at sleep clinics and the team believes it will dramatically reduce diagnostic costs for several reasons: patients can easily carry out the test at home; they do not require complex instructions; the risk of damaging or failing to return an expensive wired device is removed.

Further, said Reuveny, clinics can distribute multiple patches and carry out tests simultaneously, “With disposable patches you can do much more and you can also remove the waiting lists, you remove the friction.”

When Technology Innovation Meets Entrepreneurship

Reuveny has embraced the opportunities offered by the Runway Startup Postdoc Program at the Jacobs Institute. The program’s mission of taking digital science specialists and helping them become entrepreneurs was a perfect fit for him.

“They really help you to start things,” he said, “They give you all the initial services and support to start a company such as legal advice, IP advice and business mentorship, which is really very helpful at the first stages.”

TATCH recently won acceptance to a New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and HITLAB Digital Health Breakthrough Network program for healthcare, innovation, and technology in New York City. “This program provides us with a clinical pilot in a sleep clinic in New York City, and they are very helpful in administering the pilot and testing the device. This will be the first meet of the patch with real patients which is very exciting for us,” Reuveny said.

The next steps for the patch include bringing the prototype to product stage, starting clinical pilots, and investigating its application in the diagnoses of other sleep disorders.

The post Could This Smart Patch Help People Finally Get a Good Night’s Sleep? appeared first on Cornell Tech.

At the event, Ma spoke about China’s economy and his company, Tencent Holdings, a Chinese Internet company that ranks as one of the country’s top businesses by market capital. He was joined by Chen Liming, MS ’89, the chairman of IBM Greater China Group; Yu Gang, MS ’86, co-founder and chairman of New Peak Group’ and Zhu Jonathan Jia Esq, JD ’92, managing director of Bain Capital Asia, all of whom serve on the new Cornell China advisory board which will provide continuous strategic advice about the development of Cornell’s increasing presence in China.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation:

The shift from desktop to mobile

Ma believes that all companies, and especially technology companies, will have to continuously develop technological advances or risk becoming outdated. He used Tencent and it’s rival company, Alibaba, as a case study.

“We know that the penetration of technology in China is smaller than that of the world. Yet, the market capital of Tencent and Alibaba have already exceeded $400 billion which can compete with the major United States technology corporations,” he said. “That’s all because of the mobile Internet.”

Over the past six to seven years, he’s seen a shift from desktop to mobile and companies have had to adapt their technology for the technological trend. In fact, he notes that Tencent survived as a company because of the success of WeChat, their mobile messaging and payment app that reportedly has more than 900 million monthly active users.

Mobile payments and the competition between Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WePay led to new technological innovations and caused the market to grow at rapid speed. According to Ma, China has 50% more mobile transactions than the United States. Ma has noticed that mobile pay has scaled technological platforms that rely on the technology and increased use in “traditional industries” such as education and healthcare.

The impact of artificial intelligence

“The future of Tencent’s development will focus on two terms: the first is technology and the second is culture,” said Ma. “No matter how advanced technology becomes, the culture cannot be replaced.”

He predicts a future in which manual work will be replaced by robots but humans will continue to be responsible for “advanced thinking and innovation.”

Tencent has already started to create machine learning algorithms, but he reiterates that artificial intelligence can’t replace humans. “Whatever is strategic and creative has to be done by a human. Artificial intelligence can support humans,” he said.

Chen also spoke about the impact AI will have on the future of work and, especially the medical industry. He notes that AI can be used to efficiently and effectively conduct research and analyze all of the available medical data to come up with a few possible diagnoses.

The startup scene in China

China used to learn from Western businesses then adapt it for China, according to Yu. “Later we figured out how to adopt Western business models and innovate in terms of business models. We are seeing a lot of businesses with their own models, services, and technology,” he said, “Today we are seeing Chinese businesses with global applications, and I would expect there would be more companies like that as we move forward.”

Cornell Tech students had the opportunity to gain insights into China’s current and future technological advancements and how they will impact China’s economy and the global economy at large. One thing is clear: China will continue to be a leader in the “Digital Revolution.”

The post Tencent’s Founder Ma Huateng Shares Technology’s Impact on the Global Economy appeared first on Cornell Tech.

I joined Cornell Tech just over two years ago. The selling point to convince me to go back to academia was a simple analogy with the early days of aviation. Back then, there was no science of flying. Aviation pioneers rarely knew what they were doing; they hadn’t discovered the “principles” behind flying; and yet they were trying, inventing, innovating, sometimes at the cost of their lives. The point of the analogy was that “being digital” today is not that different from flying back then. And the mission of Cornell Tech is to provide these foundations: “integrating technology, business, law and design in service of economic impact and societal good.”

The Equifax Debacle

This current state of affairs was brought back to the forefront very violently in the last few weeks with the Equifax “affair”, where the digital lives of more than 143 million Americans have been put at risk.

« Equifax, one of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies, said on Thursday that hackers had gained access to company data that potentially compromised sensitive information for 143 million American consumers, including Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers. » — as reported by the New York Times.

This is not the first one: Yahoo! is another example. And this is certainly not the last one.

The saddest part of the story is that (1) Equifax could have prevented this tragedy and (2) Equifax managed to make things even worse by exposing further personal information in their attempt to let people figure out if their identity had been compromised.

According to various reports, the root cause of the breach was a failure to apply a security patch on a piece of software (the Apache Struts web framework ) used to run one of the company’s websites.

When the breach was made public, Equifax launched a dedicated website on a separate domain to let potential victims find out if they are at risk. It was hard for users to figure out if this new domain was legit. The company itself misled users by pointing them to a fake domain launched by a “concerned programmer”. Also, sending the last 5 digits of your SS is not the most reassuring thing to do. This is not that different from what concerned Ashley Madison’s users had to go through.

The congressional hearing revealed even more “horrors”, including the fact that Equifax was storing sensitive information in plain text. For even more details, John Oliver dedicated his most recent “Last Week Tonight” episode to Equifax.

Cornell Tech to the rescue?

Here are a few examples of ongoing efforts by the Cornell Tech community to address these types of issues.

Regarding the first issue, one of Cornell Tech’s spinout companies tackles this exact problem. GitLinks — founded in 2016 — “lists all open source components and track vulnerabilities [and] [f]or each component we monitor security risks, legal risks, and version updates.”

So, in the case of Equifax, GitLinks software would have identified Apache Struts as being used by the company and sent an alarm regarding the discovered vulnerability.

Regarding the second issue, the company was asking users to share their personal information in order to find out if their personal information had been comprised. This is the essence of phishing. Fortunately, there are secure ways to check whether Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is part of a leaked dataset. Some on-going research at Cornell Tech is exploring this issue. With more and more data leaks uncovered every week, having a solid toolset to make it easy, fast and secure for people to check their PII against a given dataset without disclosing their PII is critical.

Finally, regarding the storage of password and sensitive data — which was unveiled during the congressional hearings — some published research by Cornell Tech offers various ways to make the storage of passwords more secure with the Pythia project, led by Professor Ari Juels and Professor Thomas Ristenpart; or handle typos gracefully while preserving security using the TypTop System, co-designed by PhD student Rahul Chatterjee and Professor Thomas Ristenpart. A reference implementation for each project is available on github.

Conclusion

Of course things are not that simple. Flight safety was not achieved right away and this is still an ongoing battle. Our digital lives will always face challenges but this is not an excuse for not trying to build solid foundations, to spend some time researching better solution and educate younger generations about problems and solutions.

Cornell Tech offers a unique combination of academic research and graduate education, mixing students and faculties from diverse backgrounds and bringing real problems to the core of the conversation.

If you are a student (computer science, electrical engineering, operation research), check our Masters and PhD programs. If you are more business oriented, check our MBA Tech. If you are a lawyer, check our LLM.

If you are a company, work with our students by submitting a product challenge and hire our new grads.

If you are a philanthropist, fund some of our initiatives.

“If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.” — Chinese proverb.

Resources

• https://www.gitlinks.com
• The Pythia PRF Service (github repo)
• The TypTop System: Personalized Typo-tolerant Password Checking (github repo)
• Professor Thomas Ristenpart
• Professor Ari Juels
• PhD candidate Rahul Chatterjee

Update

Last week, Github announced that it will soon provide a way to see vulnerabilities in packages used in a given repository. And a consortium led by Google and IBM announced the launch of the Grafeas open source project to keep track of “authorship and code provenance”. So, GitLinks is getting some competition. On a sadder note, the Equifax website seems to be serving malicious ads to its visitors.

The post 3 Cornell Tech Innovations to Prevent a Future Equifax-like Breach appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Rethink Impact Founder and Managing Director Jenny Abramson, Black Girls Code Founder and CEO Kimberly Bryant, and Cornell Tech Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost Dan Huttenlocher shared a multifaceted approach to shifting the statistic in a conversation moderated by Bloomberg’s Scarlet Fu at Bloomberg Live’s Sooner Than You Think conference held at Cornell Tech last month.

The role of education in diversifying tech

Cornell Tech focuses on diversity on all levels of the pipeline, Huttenlocher said, noting the campus’ K-12 Initiative to teach tech skills to New York City public school students and the WiTNY (Women in Technology and Entrepreneurship in NY) initiative to support incoming freshman and current women at The City University of New York who are interested in pursuing tech and entrepreneurship. “As you move further and further up the pipeline, you get a lower and lower percentage of participation of diverse people. You can’t attack it at any one level; you need to look at all these levels in parallel,” Huttenlocher said.

Fostering inclusion in companies

“We have this issue of a leaky pipeline, so to speak,” said Bryant, explaining that despite recruiting diverse talent, companies aren’t retaining diverse team members and they advance to leadership positions far less often than their more homogeneous counterparts.

“All of these issues are impacting this inertia that is not moving the needle,” Bryant explained. Businesses should focus on creating a supportive corporate culture that enables all people to advance.

In addition to teaching technology skills, Black Girls Code teaches young women the diverse skills they’ll need to thrive in their careers and hopefully fix the leaky pipeline. “We are looking at leadership development, collaboration skills, and team building, because we know that [students] will need a diversity of things in their toolkit to really be successful in the industry,” Bryant explained.

How diversity benefits the bottom line

“The more diversity you have, whether it’s ethnic, racial, or gender, the better financial returns you’ll have,” said Abramson.

To illustrate, she explained that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 30% more likely to perform above the mean in their industry. Similarly companies that go from zero to a 30% female leadership team have a 15% increase in net revenue.

Data shows the results are there, “but not enough people know it at this point,” she said adding that currently only 2.19% of all venture capital funding goes to women.

One way to increase funding is to increase the number of diverse venture capitalists, Abramson explained, noting a recent Harvard University study that tracked venture capitalists’ conversations with male and female founders. The conversations about male founders were generally more positive than the ones about female founders. “I think what it tells you is that there are some serious unconscious biases there and it’s why it is so critical to have people of diverse backgrounds at every stage of investing so that these natural inclinations can be dealt with,” Abramson said.

The post ​Tech Experts Share the Importance of Diversity and How to Foster Inclusion appeared first on Cornell Tech.

According to Andrew Mendez, Technion-Cornell Dual Master’s Degrees in Connective Media ’18, “[This] program was an amazing opportunity to engage with Verizon as they try to innovate in the mixed reality space. I learned a lot about the state of the industry and the problems that must be solved.” Mendez is also co-founder of the product Blend, a mixed-reality app.

The event marks the culmination of the Verizon Connected Futures Prototyping and Talent Development Program which began in January of this year. It is run in partnership with NYC Media Lab, a nonprofit consortium connecting educational institutions with corporate technology firms. During the program, graduate students are matched with industry mentors and form teams to create products which solve a challenge set by the sponsor. 2017 was Verizon’s second year as sponsor.

“For us, it’s a give first mentality—we want to be supportive of innovation happening on local campuses,” said Christian Guirnalda, a program mentor and director at Verizon’s open innovation labs, adding, “This is the new Verizon.”

The nation’s largest telecommunications firm hopes that through these students, they can keep up with a pace of change that’s ever accelerating. In a presentation video, the Verizon team stated, “We recognize, even as a Fortune 50 company, that we need additional help.” Sometimes it takes fresh eyes and sharp minds to spot the next big thing, and this year’s eleven teams did not disappoint.

The team behind Blend, including Mendez and his co-founders Iris Qu, Parsons Master in Fine Arts ’17, and Jasmine Oh, Parsons Master in Fine Arts ’17, presented their mixed reality app, which allows companies to append virtual animations and coupon offers to otherwise regular physical products to enhance the experience.

The fact that Blend and many other teams are comprised of students mixed from a variety of programs is deliberate. NYC Media Lab hopes that by combining diverse teams from educational institutions like Cornell Tech, New York University, Parsons, and more, they will enhance the creativity of what is produced.

Iris, another team made of Cornell Tech and Parsons students, applied their backgrounds in the media industry to build an IoT screen projector designed to liberate consumers from the confines of their desktop or TV. The students, Tosin Adeniji, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’17, Lydia Li, Master in Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE) ’17, and Priyal Parikh, Parsons Master in Fine Arts ’17, envision Iris devices that will allow users to walk from room to room with video content following them, projected onto any suitable surface.

Reflecting on what prepared her for today’s presentation, Adeniji mentioned her current graduate program. “What I’ve really loved about [Cornell Tech] is that it’s great to have academic folks telling you where tech is going and it’s even better to also be around those actually practicing it in the field.”

Field experience can be important when identifying real problems to solve. Another product, Felix, was born out of its founders’ frustration with conferences. It helps event attendees eliminate business cards and the unproductive time spent hunting for the right connections. Built by Clara Shim, Master in Computer Science ’18, and Chumeng Xu, Technion-Cornell Dual Master’s Degrees in Connective Media ’18, Felix arms users with connected gloves that exchange information with a simple handshake.

Other projects demonstrated at the event included a virtual reality game that teaches kids to spot fake news, a wearable, haptic kneepad to coach cyclists, and a visual shopping chatbot. Nearly all these solutions were built using ThingSpace, an open source platform created by Verizon, and many are run on Verizon’s 4G network.

From this deep well of investment spring occasional winners. Last year’s program gave birth to three companies: Svrround, which has since taken on additional outside funding, Vidrovr, which has since completed the Techstars NYC program, and Teleobjects, which has since entered NYC Media Lab’s accelerator, The Combine.

The journey for this year’s students is far from over. Adeniji and Li from team Iris have both accepted offers to work at Verizon, on the innovation lab and data science teams respectively. Programs such as this one give organizations like Verizon a powerful school-to-industry pipeline for top talent. his year at least six participants will take job offers, up over last year’s two. Several more are considering joining Verizon’s accelerator program, where graduate students leverage their experience directly into careers.

According to Mendez of Blend, “Cornell Tech has been key to my career path. It’s connected me to opportunities such as the Verizon Challenge, offers an education not taught at other schools, and has really opened up a universe of possibility.”

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“With the Startup Awards, Cornell Tech is able to identify innovative and promising startup ideas coming out of our graduate community, providing them the support and funding needed to kickstart their companies after graduation in the competitive startup ecosystem,” said David Tisch, Head of Startup Studio at Cornell Tech, managing partner of BoxGroup and co-founder of Spring and TechStars NYC.

The Startup Awards grew directly from the culture of entrepreneurship central to the master’s student experience at Cornell Tech. In their final semester, every student enrolls in Startup Studio, where teams of engineering and business students develop their own startup ideas. Cornell Tech created the award program to fill the void for students who have strong prototypes and pitches from their academic work at Cornell Tech, but lack the deep networks and wealth necessary to financially support themselves in the initial phases before seed funding traditionally becomes available. Cornell Tech’s Startup Studio program is run by Tisch and Greg Pass, Cornell Tech’s Chief Entrepreneurial Officer and former Twitter CTO.

“Forest City has been happy to support the Startup Awards, housing the last two cohorts of winners at our New York Times Building. We are thrilled to welcome the first group of graduates’ companies to The Bridge, adding to the unique ecosystem of leading companies – including Two Sigma – working alongside Cornell Tech academic teams,” said MaryAnne Gilmartin, President and CEO of Forest City New York.

This year’s final selected winners were:

• SageLink –  SageLink connects conversational voice-based applications with marketers to create native and contextual voice ads.
• Speech Up – Speech Up is a mobile app that gamifies the speech therapy process to provide an affordable, engaging, and accessible speech therapy platform for kids.
• Switch – Switch is an intelligent digital broker that recommends personalized work benefits based on a worker’s gig profile. On-demand coverage lets users save money by insuring themselves only while they are on the job. With quick onboarding, simple terms and effortless claims, freelancers can spend less time covering losses and more time earning money.
• Ursa –  Ursa is helping product teams build products that users want. Ursa provides collaborative tools that enable 17 million product creatives to capture and analyze user insights for product ideation, design, and validation. followursa.com

Past Startup Awards winners include Uru, content-aware video advertising technology that has raised more than $955,000 in pre-seed funding, Trigger Finance, an “if-this-then-that” platform that tracks the stock market in real time that has raised $600,000, and GitLinks, a software that monitors open source for enterprises that has raised nearly $400,000.

More than 30 startups have been formed on the Cornell Tech campus to date, including the Startup Awards, the Runway Startup Postdoc Program at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, and other alumni. The companies have raised a total of $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding, employ 105 people, and 93% of them are headquartered in NYC.

The Startup Awards winners will work out of the Cornell Tech space at The Bridge on the new Cornell Tech campus opening September 2017. Designed by Weiss/Manfreid architects, The Bridge at Cornell Tech is a first-of-its-kind building that will house an extraordinary mix of cutting-edge companies working alongside groundbreaking Cornell academic teams: from recent Cornell Tech graduates hustling to commercialize a new idea, to start-ups on the verge of explosive growth, and established companies developing leading edge technologies and products. Tech and investment firm Two Sigma was announced as the inaugural tenant and will open a new Collision Lab in the building, where engineers from its R&D team will tackle difficult challenges away from the company’s main campus and interact with innovative start-up companies backed by Two Sigma Ventures, a division of Two Sigma. The Collision Lab will also serve as a tool for Two Sigma to retain and attract the best talent by providing unique access to Cornell Tech’s dynamic ecosystem of innovation. For more information, visit www.thebridgeatcornelltech.com.

About Cornell Tech

Cornell Tech brings together faculty, business leaders, tech entrepreneurs, and students in a catalytic environment to reinvent the way we live in the digital age. Cornell Tech’s temporary campus has been up and running at Google’s Chelsea building since 2013, with a growing world-class faculty, and more than 200 masters and Ph.D. students who collaborate extensively with tech-oriented companies and organizations and pursue their own start-ups. Construction is underway on Cornell Tech’s campus on Roosevelt Island, with a first phase due to open in September 2017. When fully completed, the campus will include 2 million square feet of state-of-the-art buildings, over 2 acres of open space, and will be home to more than 2,000 graduate students and hundreds of faculty and staff.

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