PiTech at Cornell Tech is activating a community of technologists, researchers, and practitioners dedicated to societal challenges.
Philanthropic Partners
PiTech is made possible by a generous gift from the Siegel Family Endowment, along with support provided by The Atlantic Philanthropies and a collection of other donors committed to our mission of advancing technology for a better world. We are enormously grateful to our philanthropic partners, who have played a critical role in making our work and impact a reality.
Who We Work With
Our NYC-based partner organizations draw from government, civil society, and the nonprofit sector, spanning many critical subject matter domains, including:
Public health: health care provision and accessibility
Social justice: food insecurity, criminal justice reform, and economic inequality
Trustworthy media ecosystems: combatting racism, hate speech, and misinformation
Public services: public service provision, housing, transportation, and civic engagement
Environment: sustainability and conservation
Host organizations
Would you like Cornell students to contribute their skills to advance strategic projects at your organization?
The Siegel PiTech PhD Impact Fellowship supports Cornell Tech PhD students in technical fields to conduct 12-week summer externships with nonprofit and public sector organizations across NYC. Students immerse themselves in real-world projects, gain exposure to the technology challenges facing public interest organizations, and contribute critical skills and expertise to advancing their host organization’s mission.
PiTech Success Stories
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PIT Cases: Climate Change AI, Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
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.
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Innovating Dental Experiences with AR for Autism
The organization YAI, who has been dedicated to supporting the intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) community in different ways for decades, seeks to reshape the dental experience for the I/DD community, particularly for those with autism. With the increasing accessibility of AR/VR technology, and its unique capability to enable different interactions within physical spaces, we're confronted with an intriguing challenge: Can mixed reality be the antidote to SPD challenges in current dental settings?
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Efficient, but Equitable Access to Information
The Mayor’s Office of People with Disabilities (MOPD) charioted the effort of creating an accessible chatbot for the NYC’s government website. Chatbots and large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising technologies to sift through enormous amounts of text, as well as infer information to respond to questions. I sought out to explore these possibilities with the MOPD as a Siegel Family Endowment PiTech PhD Impact Fellow in summer 2023 which later required partnering with the Office of Technology & Innovation (OTI), and other city agencies.
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Communicating weather data when the stakes are high
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).
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Improving IT Support Workflows at NYC Housing Authority
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.
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How Can People With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Be Supported With Computer Vision AI in the Future?
Individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) often require specialized support, particularly those who are prone to seizures. To address this, a project was initiated to develop a computer vision AI tool that uses pose and motion recognition to detect seizures in real-time. This technology aims to enhance the safety and autonomy of people with I/DD and provide direct support professionals with effective monitoring tools.
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Statistical modeling of New York City building construction times with the NYC DDC
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.
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The New York Botanical Garden Canopy Classification Dataset - A Dataset for Machine Learning Tasks in Biodiversity Informatics
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.
