Work with Good Call NYC to analyze New York City’s arrest data. Early legal representation has a large impact on the future of arrested individuals but not everybody has access to it. Although US citizens have the legal right to a lawyer, public defenders are not assigned a case until several hours before the arraignment trial, which can be up to 72 hours after arrest. In effect, early legal representation is only accessible to individuals with the money to hire private lawyers and the means to contact them from the police station.

Application of natural language processing techniques to analyze data consisting of 4,000 independent text entries, each representing a New Yorker’s idea (see the pipeline here). My primary analysis used unsupervised learning to highlight key themes and visualize their relationship, using BERTopic, which implements topic modeling to identify 39 topics and provides hierarchical analysis to help merge these topics into 16 key themes.

Climate Change AI - CCAI is now scaling its impact thanks to support from the Jacobs Institute through the Public Interest Technology (PiTech) Initiative and the Runway Startup Postdoc at Cornell Tech, a PIT-UN study case.

This year, we extend a warm welcome to 12 exceptional PhD students specializing in computer and information science, who have committed their summers to applying their technological prowess towards addressing pressing public needs at their respective host organizations. We are honored to have them join us!

Maria João Sousa, joins Cornell Tech’s Public Interest Technology Initiative (PiTech) as PiTech Startup Postdoc in the Runway Program. In this new role, Maria will work as Incoming Executive Director at Climate Change AI (CCAI), a global non-profit that catalyzes impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning. Before joining the PiTech Initiative, Maria pursued her PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, in Lisbon (Portugal), which she is set to defend in 2023. Her doctoral thesis focused on cooperative aerial robotics and artificial intelligence for wildfire detection and monitoring systems and was developed as a research fellow at both IDMEC in the Center of Intelligent Systems and at ADAI in the Forest Fire Research Center.

Nicki is an Associate Professor in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. She co-founded CETA in 2018 with Professor Tom Ristenpart in partnership with the New York City Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence. Nicki is excited to build connections between CETA and the PiTech community. 

Biodiversity monitoring is an important task in conservation biology, however, it is resource intensive, requiring time, money, expertise, and a large on–the–ground presence that is not always possible due to conflict, politics, etc. Potentially traditional biodiversity monitoring techniques can be supplemented with an inexpensive tool that utilizes remote sensing data and deep learning models to remotely monitor biodiversity. 

People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) seek to live independent and self-determined lives. However, they often need support to succeed with their daily routines. The organization YAI trains and employs direct support professionals (DSPs), who are the backbone of that support. Depending on amount of support they need, people with I/DD can be on labor-intensive one-on-one (and even two-on-one) staffing for long periods of their day and night and, to make matters more complicated, they may have other health conditions, such as epilepsy.

Imaginaries of tech entrepreneurship and startup culture typically conjure up images of tech giants, Silicon Valley, and Ivy League drop-outs climbing their way to billionaire status. Rarely, if ever, do discussions of tech and start-up culture render thoughts about the realities, the aspirations of vulnerable populations. The Robinhood Foundation, a New York centered philanthropic organization geared towards alleviating poverty, is working to change this. Through their programming with Blue Ridge Labs, they deploy two programs to systematize the creation of technologies, start-ups, and founders dedicated to creating a positive social impact in New York City.

The New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC) is a city government agency that manages the construction of public buildings, such as libraries and courthouses, and infrastructures, such as roadwork and electrical systems, throughout the city’s five boroughs. The density and diversity of urban landscapes within the United States’ most populous city present unique challenges to planning construction projects; in particular, being able to accurately estimate the amount of time required for construction is important for allocating resources and ensuring minimal disruption to the neighborhood surrounding a construction project.

Biodiversity literature is dedicated to the identification, documentation, and categorization of plants, fungi, animals, and other living organisms. Correctly extracting the name of an organism within these documents involves finding the entire scientific name–including the genus, specific epithet, and author name (a plant name shown below). Extracting these names allows biologists to access documents about a species more comprehensively, and to track an organism’s history of documentation by botanists, which includes biological changes and changes in how scientists describe them. However, correctly finding organisms by their scientific names is made difficult by ambiguous abbreviations, changing botanical and zoological codes and conventions, and poor data quality.

The US federal government sees childcare as affordable if it does not exceed 7 percent of income. It may be no surprise that licensed 0-3 home-based and center-based childcare is unaffordable for most New York City households. Moreover, unmet childcare needs come at a cost to businesses. Before COVID-19, employers lost $12.7 billion a year due to employee childcare challenges. COVID-19 related school and daycare closures exacerbated these losses, as millions of women left the workforce.

How does a 90-year old government agency with 12,000 employees embrace technology on all fronts: hardware, software, and the processes that come with managing both? Part of the struggle lies in IT support — an often overlooked yet crucial part of every business. At the NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA), IT support employees already process 9.2k tickets per month. Yet with increased need for digital devices and business software, IT issues are bound to increase.

Without an intuitive and useful workflow for resolving IT issues, employees may feel frustrated, stuck, and unable to complete their tasks. They are less able to serve the 300,000+ tenants who live in NYCHA’s public housing developments in NYC. What tickets were NYCHA employees even submitting to resolve their IT issues?

For many years, the online consumer data ecosystem was a digital wild west: Consumers had almost no way to protect their online data, especially once it was already collected by companies.

Fortunately, recent consumer privacy regulations have since created safeguards for consumers’ online data. Laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have empowered users with new online data rights. Under CCPA, for instance, California residents can send requests to companies asking to access, delete, or opt-out of the sale of their personal data.

The Public Interest Technology (PiTech) Initiative at Cornell Tech is thrilled to welcome its inaugural PiTech Runway Startup Postdoc, Priya Donti, to the Runway Startup cohort this fall. Priya will work on scaling her nonprofit Climate Change AI, which aims to catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning. “Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, requiring the mobilization of many different tools and approaches from across society,” says Priya. “Through our work at Climate Change AI, we aim to foster the use of machine learning in ways that support and strengthen climate change efforts.”

Cornell Tech’s Public Interest Tech initiative (PiTech) is pleased to welcome its second cohort of Visiting Practitioners (ViPs). The goal of the program is to foster collaborations with tech leaders from a range of impact-oriented organizations, and engage in conversations around PiTech at Cornell Tech. ViPs engage with Cornell Tech students and other community members in multiple ways throughout the semester, giving talks, offering office hours, providing feedback on product and business ideas, pursuing their own capstone projects, and informing the direction of PiTech at Cornell Tech.

As the Public Interest Technology Initiative at Cornell Tech enters its third academic year, it continues to bring a public interest lens to graduate studies at Cornell Tech.

PiTech Initiative programs are specialized to the needs of individuals across all stages of the academic career trajectory, from master’s students and PhDs, to Postdocs and Faculty. Our goal is to create meaningful ways for each of those groups to apply technology to serve public needs and engage with social impact organizations throughout their time at Cornell Tech.

“My vision for the PiTech Initiative is to inspire and empower the next generation of technologists, leaders, and researchers to harness technology and address real-world challenges at public sector and non-profit organizations, and to advance justice, equity, and social welfare,” says Małgosia. “With everything I do, I will strive to not only further this vision but also to position Cornell Tech as a cutting-edge, world-renowned program shaping the conversation on PiTech.”

Anjana Rajan, a renowned technology executive, social entrepreneur, and applied cryptographer, joins Cornell Tech’s Public Interest Technology initiative (PiTech) as an Entrepreneur in Residence. In this new role, she will work on launching new technology ventures that address important human rights and national security issues.

Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla Corporation, delivered an inspiring keynote speech to Cornell Tech graduates at the Class of 2022’s Recognition Ceremony. She congratulated the graduating class remarking, “Seeing you, another community of people building something different, is wildly uplifting; a new generation of people attuned to technology and the common good. I am so moved and so buoyed up by the choice you made to come here, and by what you will do as you go forward.” She further recounted how the radical idea of open-source at Mozilla was made possible with “collaboration and a community of people invested in a product” and emphasizing how much good there is to be done by “connecting technology to public benefit and the common good”.