Highlighting the shortcomings exposed by Hurricane Ida in 2021, James underscores the need for accurate, localized weather information. His solution, developed during his tenure as a PiTech PhD Impact Fellow with New York City Emergency Management (NYCEM), is an innovative online dashboard. This tool, created using R and Shiny software, integrates data from the National Weather Service into an interactive map, offering real-time and predictive weather insights for each neighborhood in New York. This advancement not only streamlines the data consolidation process but also enhances decision-making capabilities for city officials and emergency responders. James' work represents a significant step towards improving urban response to hazardous weather, though he notes the necessity for further enhancements to the system.

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? Can we envision a new future of dental visits for those with I/DD through the use of AR/VR?

Block Party, a New York City-centered volunteer-supported organization, is working to built a tool to automatically summarize the text of community board meetings using speech-to-text efforts of YouTube, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and to automatically disseminate the resulting summary in the free Block Party newsletter mailing list for each community board. During my tenure as a PiTech Impact Fellow, I was able to leverage my research and expertise in NLP in order to support the meeting summarization process. I worked closely with Sarah, brainstorming ways we might envision a new summarization process utilizing LLMs.

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.

In an effort to reclaim provider capacity, increase patient safety, and reduce alert fatigue, a team of health informatics experts was established at NYC H+H in 2020. This working group routinely assesses new and past BPAs, and modifies or removes any that are found to be unhelpful.

This study delved into the factors that influence consumer decisions around personal data management, inquired about the specific companies and data types that trigger high levels of concern, and sought to discern consumers' expectations for privacy tools.

As a Siegel PiTech PhD Impact Fellow, I collaborated closely with the City of Ithaca and partnered with BlocPower, a climate technology company, over the summer to develop a web application. The web application was designed to aid stakeholders, not only within Ithaca but across various municipalities in New York state, in estimating the quarterly workforce increase required to achieve the goal of complete building electrification by 2030.

Employing a Bayesian latent variable model to navigate the complexities of library usage, the New York Public Library (NYPL) system was scrutinized to uncover disparities in usage patterns across its branches, paving the way for operational strategies aimed at balancing these disparities, ensuring that the benefits of the library system are fairly distributed among all New Yorkers.

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.

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!

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.

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.