Public Interest Technology Initiative at Cornell Tech

Funding from the PiTech Runway Startup Postdoc program has supported both Priya Donti (a CCAI co-founder) and Maria João Sousa (CCAI’s executive director) as they seek to transfer the skills and knowledge developed through their doctoral programs to the social impact space.

Serena prototyped an augmented reality (AR) application that converts tactile feedback from key moments of a dental visit into visual and auditory distractions to enhance patients' control over their environment, making dental visits less overwhelming. Having received positive feedback from YAI’s stakeholders, Serena is continuing to collaborate with YAI beyond her fellowship to perform user testing with patients and caregivers, refine the design, and implement it within medical service settings.

Working with the Mayor’s Office of People with Disabilities (MOPD), Mahika Phutane developed an accessible chatbot for the NYC government website, ensuring equitable access to information for residents with disabilities. Recognizing the inaccessibility of existing chatbots for the visually-impaired, she focused on creating a front-end interface compatible with assistive technologies, such as screen readers, and utilizing ARIA attributes. Mahika is continuing her work with MOPD beyond the fellowship to explore AI integration for intelligent text synthesis and making the chatbot open-source for widespread use.

Working alongside the NYCEM meteorologist and developers to design an online dashboard to help address weather data. The dashboard uses data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), accessed through an application program interface (API).

I identified 19 changes based on participant data that could improve the IT ticketing experience (e.g., consistency in naming, increasing the findability of the site, and various design tweaks to improve usability). In a design session with one manager, we sketched out a variety of improvements that we wanted to see based on the proposed changes. Based on these changes, I created a low-fidelity demo on Figma.

Hauke worked closely with members of YAI’s Center for Innovation and Engagement in exploring how AI-assisted video monitoring technology could help people with I/DD, specifically those with a high risk of seizures, lead independently without labor-intensive, one-on-one staff monitoring. To identify movements of people with I/DD that may indicate seizures, Hauke prototyped a computer vision-based system which utilizes pose and motion recognition and integrated it with a smartphone app for real-time monitoring and alert notifications.

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 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.