NEWS POST: Tech-Oriented New York Grad School Launched By Contest Opens

This Aug. 16, 2017, photo shows the main buildings of Cornell Tech - the main academic building called the Bloomberg Centre, left, a 26-story residence hall, centre, and a programmes building called the Bridge, right, on Roosevelt Island in New York. Bebeto Matthews AP Photo

The city's quest to make itself a legitimate rival to Silicon Valley as a high-tech hub has long bumped up against some harsh realities, among them the fact it hasn't had a top-tier technology school pumping out the next generation of entrepreneurs and engineers.

A potential answer to that problem, a new technology-oriented graduate school called Cornell Tech, cuts the ribbon Wednesday on the first phase of its new campus on an island in the East River.

The collaboration between Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, built with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars from philanthropies and from the city, has just 250 master's degree students and 50 doctorate students taking classes this fall. But officials hope to ramp up to 2,000 students by the time the campus is fully developed.

Part of the concept is to promote close ties between academia and the startup economy, officials said.

"Cornell Tech presented an opportunity that is almost unheard of today, to build a new type of academic program and a new type of campus from scratch," Martha Pollack, the computer scientist who was named the 14th president of Cornell University this year, said in a speech to a business group.

She called the school "the first of its kind campus, built for the digital age."

The first three buildings of a 12-acre campus on Roosevelt Island are opening Wednesday after a fledgling Cornell Tech programme spent the past four years as a rent-free tenant at a Google office building in Manhattan.

The campus was born from a competition held by New York City in 2011, backed by independent then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who made his fortune selling innovative data terminals to Wall Street.

Donations to build the new campus have included US$100 million from the former mayor's charity, Bloomberg Philanthropies, US$350 million from philanthropist and duty-free magnate Chuck Feeney and US$133 million from Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs. The city provided US$100 million in seed money plus development rights on city land.

Students in fields including engineering, computer science, business and health tech are living this fall in a newly opened 26-story residence hall with sweeping views of Manhattan on one side and Queens on the other.

Cornell Tech's main academic building, called the Bloomberg Center, looks far more like a tech company than a university. Professors and researchers type away at laptops in the open-plan office. If they want privacy for a meeting they can repair to a huddle room.

There are no book-lined faculty offices, nor, it appeared during a recent visit, any books at all.

"It's a real shock to the system for those of us who come from academia," Pollack said. "You can't imagine going to a faculty member and saying, 'No, you're not going to have an office. You're going to be in an open floor plan.'"

The third Cornell Tech building, called the Bridge, is owned by developer Forest City Ratner and will be shared by the school and commercial tenants including, so far, Citigroup and Italian chocolate maker Ferrero, the maker of Nutella.

Pollack said the arrangement means that "our students and researchers will interact with startups, entrepreneurs, investors and established companies all in the pursuit of commercial innovation."

The Technion, Israel's oldest university, is responsible for two of the seven master's programs Cornell Tech offers. The programmes in health tech and connective media are part of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, which also hosts a post-doctoral startup program for graduates to transform their research into new companies.

The Technion's president, Peretz Lavie, said he was flattered when Bloomberg invited him to enter the competition for a New York campus but he knew that the Technion would need an American partner. The Cornell-Technion marriage works because the two universities share similar educational missions, Lavie said.

"It's a match made in heaven for many reasons," he said in a telephone interview.

Bloomberg acknowledged when he announced the competition back in 2011 that it would take time for New York to become the high-tech leader he envisioned.

"We understand that we will not catch up to Silicon Valley overnight," he said. "Building a state-of-the-art campus will take years - and attracting a critical mass of technology entrepreneurs may take even longer."

But Bloomberg said he believed that in its first three decades the school could help launch 400 new companies.

Cornell Tech officials say that more than 30 startups have been formed out of the program, raising US$20 million and employing 105 people.

Cornell Tech Starts Up

With its new Roosevelt Island campus set to open in September, the school is already transforming the tech ecosystem

Nanit, a New York City startup founded in 2014, has 25 employees, US$6.6 million from investors and a high-tech product that local media and nervous parents adore. Its baby monitor can classify babies' nighttime behaviors, analyze their sleep patterns and report everything back to anxious moms and dads by the morning.

Nanit has sold out the first 12 runs of its US$349 monitor, which costs nearly US$700 with a stand and an annual subscription service. But the company might not exist at all if not for Cornell Tech, the city's new graduate school for applied sciences and engineering.

Nanit's founder and CEO, Assaf Glazer, is an Israeli with a Ph.D. in computer vision, the science of teaching computers to recognize their surroundings. When he enrolled at Cornell Tech, he knew he could use computerized cameras to understand babies' sleep. But the school's Runway Startup Postdoc program, in which he participated from 2014 to 2015, taught him how to turn his idea into a company.

"I thought that being at Cornell Tech—and being in New York in general—was one of the prominent factors in our success," he said. "The idea of Runway is to take science to the extreme in a way that will be accessible for businesses to grow out of."

In September Cornell Tech—a collaboration between Cornell University and Technion–the Israel Institute of Technology—will open the first buildings on its Roosevelt Island campus, a 12-acre, US$2 billion complex seeded with US$100 million in city funds.

Six years ago, at the end of the Great Recession, Mayor Michael Bloomberg solicited proposals for a school that could anchor and nurture the city's incipient tech sector. The idea was to help the city diversify away from the financial services industry that had been the economy's bedrock until it started to crack during the crisis. In September Cornell Tech—a collaboration between Cornell University and Technion–the Israel Institute of Technology—will open the first buildings on its Roosevelt Island campus, a 12-acre, US$2 billion complex seeded with US$100 million in city funds. They include the Bloomberg Center, an academic building, and The House, a residential complex. The third building, known as The Bridge, will facilitate the collaboration of industry and academia with the aim of creating technology companies that run on serious science and serve the city's traditional industries, most notably advertising, fashion, finance, media and medicine.

In the years since Bloomberg's push, New York's tech industry has transformed from a stand-alone sector to something that pervades the entire economy. Tech employment grew 31% between 2010 and 2016, to 218,758, which includes both tech firm jobs and tech jobs in other industries, according to the Partnership for New York City. Industry insiders say the school inspired an if-you-build-it-they-will-come attitude that turned the city into a magnet for tech talent and venture funding, which peaked at US$8.7 billion in 2015 and was US$7.8 billion last year for the metro area.

"Cornell Tech was a very important milestone in establishing a pillar, an institution that would help recognize New York as a tech center at a particularly important time when we were converting to a tech economy," said Andrew Rasiej, chairman of the NY Tech Alliance, a nonprofit supporting the local tech community.

Three years before breaking ground on the Roosevelt Island campus in 2015, Cornell Tech quietly began testing its concept of a school for applied sciences inside Google's New York headquarters. Last month Cornell handed out 130 graduate-level diplomas, bringing to nearly 350 the pool of students who have graduated from its program. Together they have produced 30 companies that have raised $20 million and employ 105 people, almost all in New York City.

The achievements of the first batch of students put the school ahead of its own expectations, which initially did not include launching inside Google before opening on Roosevelt Island. Still, the school remains far short of its ultimate goal, detailed in a 2011 economic-impact study, of serving 2,000 students and creating 30,000 jobs through startups its students would launch. That won't happen anytime soon. The campus is being rolled out in phases and is not expected to be fully completed until 2043.

But Cornell is also learning how to serve students and the industries in which they hope to work. Supplying the city with talented employees is as important to the school as company formation, said Daniel Huttenlocher, the dean of Cornell Tech. "Six years ago technology as its own sector was pretty fragile," Huttenlocher said. "Now tech is less and less its own vertical. There's a blurrier line between what's technology and what's information-rich industry."

The Bridge, the House and the Bloomberg Centre on Roosevelt Island

The curriculum reflects the diverse nature of New York's economy, where each industry has its own set of challenges awaiting a tech solution. Master's students choose among seven tracks, including business administration, health tech and computer science. A required master's course called Startup Studio encourages entrepreneurship. Every year four student teams each win US$100,000 and 12 months of free office space to give them time to turn ideas from the studio into viable businesses. David Tisch, who runs Startup Studio, emphasizes to students that companies formed in the course aren't expected to be Silicon Valley–style tech-for-tech's-sake kinds of organizations. Instead, they should focus on solving problems in the industries they are trying to serve. That's why Tisch requires students to run their ideas past industry leaders. "Media, publishing, finance, retail, sports, real estate: They are all based in New York," he said. "The innovation in all those areas is in tech."

The 2016 Startup Award winners say periodic interaction with established media and finance companies helped them build relevant products. "We're focused on the greater New York City area because we want to maintain the high quality of our relationships and service," said Ian Folau, co-founder and CEO of GitLinks, which came out of Cornell's Startup Studio. The firm vets open-source software for companies. IT departments at finance firms helped illuminate the problem GitLinks was trying to solve: Open-source code helps developers work faster, but it scares legal teams, who worry about the security of the vulnerable software. GitLinks has raised US$400,000 and has six employees and four clients signed on for a pilot to test its software.

To develop Nanit, Glazer worked with doctors studying at Weill Cornell's Centre for Sleep Medicine. "Being in New York was one of the prominent factors in our success," he said. "We're strongly connected to science, and we need the top researchers in sleep. All those people are in New York."

So are the workers who helped him turn his technology into a consumer-products company. Glazer hired veteran user-experience researchers, product designers and e-commerce experts. And it helped that his target market was also here: To sell to affluent, anxious parents who want to check their children's breathing or receive an alert the first time they flip over, you have to live among them. "It's hard to do a consumer product in the U.S. working out of Israel," said the father of three.

Making breaks

To nurture breakthrough companies in high-tech fields, Cornell's postdoc program pays a salary to Ph.D.s with engineering expertise and gives them access to mentors, research budgets and office space. The Bridge, with its open floor plan and central staircase, is designed to foster interaction between tenants—a hand-picked mix of academics, established businesses, startups and recent graduates.

Under construction, the first three buildings of a 12-acre campus on Roosevelt Island

Because Cornell occupies a third of the building, Forest City Ratner Cos., its developer, can afford to offer shorter leases to tenants in the other two-thirds. New companies can sign on for three to five years instead of the standard 10. Graduates of the school can also pay for month-to-month memberships in co-working spaces that are inexpensive and flexible. Maryanne Gilmartin, president and CEO of Forest City Ratner, said that as companies grow, workspaces can swell from one-sixteenth of a floor to the entire floor without losing "the charm of the architecture." "There should be a serious churn of talent in the building," she said. "To see the same companies there a decade later would be beside the point."

The first tenant to sign on is Two Sigma Investments, a technology and investment firm that will open a satellite office and lab on a full floor of The Bridge, taking up about 10,000 square feet.

The idea of the runway programme is to take science to the extreme, then create a business out of it

Until now the school's Startup Award winners are working on the 38th floor of The New York Times Building, near Times Square. From that vantage point, Bill Marino can see the firms that are testing an early iteration of a product made by the company he founded, Uru, whose technology can automatically place products and brands in videos. "The companies you can see out the windows," he said, "those are our potential customers, these huge New York media companies."

Marino would not disclose which media companies he's working with, but says Uru's four employees will move to ad firm Y&R's offices and into that company's incubator, SparkPlug.

Raising funding and seeking commercial success are benchmarks for Cornell Tech's graduates. Yet this is still academia, in which students can consider grandiose problems away from the pressures of business.

"You see students trying things that might not be realistic," said Tisch. "In a commercial environment, you're judged on reality. And that doesn't happen here. We can let ideas that are less realistic get flowing."

Like Uru's idea of putting ads into virtual reality videos.

"When you first look at it, you would think, This is not technically feasible. It would never work," said Brunno Attorre, Uru's co-founder. "But being at Cornell, we literally talked to every computer-vision professor we have available."

That includes Huttenlocher, the dean, who is also a professor and has advised Uru and Nanit on their technology. For 15 years in a doctoral program in Israel Glazer taught cameras to recognize their surroundings. "Computer-vision problems are hard to solve," he said. That's because the camera has to figure out for itself what it's looking at. But Glazer's pie-in-the-sky concept now looks like it is paying off: He aims to increase his team to 50 people by the end of this year so he can focus on expanding his computer-vision and machine-learning technology to other applications.

Cornell Tech's main academic building, called the Bloomberg Centre, looks far more like a tech company than a university. Professors and researchers type away at laptops in the open-plan office. If they want privacy for a meeting they can repair to a huddle room.

Scaling up

As Cornell Tech moves into its new home, its dean is likewise considering what it means to scale up. "We can run one Startup Studio," Huttenlocher said. "We have 150-ish students in there, and that is probably the edge of what we can do for next year. But what do multiple startup studios look like?"

How it will fit into a tech ecosystem that has grown alongside the school remains to be seen. New York's accelerators, co-working spaces, incubators, pitch nights, networking events, professional course work and tech awards have helped boost the industry beyond what Bloomberg described when he pitched a tech campus to the world. But, then again, that was the point, said Steven Strauss, whose research for the Bloomberg administration led to the creation of Cornell Tech. "There are the three stages of any product: 'You can't'; 'you can do it, but it's not worth it'; and 'obviously,' " he said. For New York City tech, he said, "we've hit stage three."

Originally published on DAILY MAIL/WIRES and CAIRN'S