Dom's Demo

This weekend, students from all over the east coast descended on NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences to participate in hackNY's fall student hackathon.  HackNY is an intercollegiate organization designed to keep the tech talent off Wall Street and interested in startups. The students spent 24 coding in order to impress judges like former TechStars NY managing director David Tisch and Chris Poole, aka Moot.

A large number of the hacks presented used Tumblr’s API, including one smut-filled surprise. Naturally, three of the projects also incorporated GIFs.

The most impressive showing of the day was definitely Dom, a video game "on top of the Internet." The game turns the layout of any website into a 3D landscape where players have to shoot away oncoming robots. Their fully-functional demo drew actual gasps from the crowd as 3D characters climbed all over Vimeo's homepage to destroy some bad guys. The game also uses Tumblr’s API to alternate between changing background images of outer space. Dom won first place and a cash prize of $1,001 to split between the team’s five members.

Another hack presented this weekend was Pulp, a cross between Mad Libs and the game telephone, where users add three words to a story at a time and corresponding popular "related images" pop up via Tumblr’s API. The team's demo hit a major snag when the word "naughty" was used and a picture of a girl fingering herself filled the screen. The crowd went wild and made jokes about this throughout the rest of the demos. A text to meme service called Cap'n Meme spoofed this later on by creating a Bad Luck Brian that said "demos hackathon, shows porn."

A couple of Princeton guys created Memepath, something that resembled a Jonah Peretti fantasy. Using the bit.ly API, their site tries to pinpoint the exact moment something becomes a meme. They used the example of "Gangnam Style" to show that Katy Perry's August 21st tweet was the moment that the video turned into a worldwide sensation. Although the science here isn't completely correct, not everything passes through bit.ly, it's a good start.

When asked if it had a more practical use, creator Santhosh Balasubramanian said that it could be used to analyze serious things. The team tried to analyze the Kony 2012 video but there wasn't enough data to go around. They also aspire to add a geo-grouping element to it, to figure out which country helps the meme machine hit its tipping point.

Lisa Li and Daria Jung from Columbia created the simply designed Have My Babies, or HMB for short. You search for a celebrity and you're instantly able see how many tweets there are asking said celeb to have the tweeter's babies. The number of tweets is represented by a corresponding number of wiggling sperm cells naturally. "It was started from an offhand comment about Justin Bieber," Ms. Li said. "It's just meant to be funny."

A team from Rutgers built Settlers of Silicon Alley, a web app of Settlers of Catan themed to the New York tech scene. In the game, developers represeted the original game's wood and designers filled in for wheat. This got a few chuckles from the crowd and it seemed like everyone wanted to play.

Henry Clifford, a student from the United Kingdom interning at content sharing network Spling this semester, was the last presenter of the day. He created Gifs With Captions, which ranks the popularity of posts from single-serving Tumblr sites like What Should We Call Me. The Internet-obsessed crowd clearly found Mr. Clifford's idea appealing. The admiration went both ways. He praised the event and told Betabeat that all of the ambassadors, employees from some of New York's tech companies that stay overnight and advise the students, were "brilliant."

Kartik Mandaville, Himanshu Pandey, and Bryan Wade created Charfit, a practical hack with real-world potential. It allows you to track fitness participation through Foursquare check-ins. If you don't keep up with your regimen, the app uses the Venmo API to donate money to your favorite charity, then Twilio bugs you about going back to the gym and to notifies you about your donation. For the final humiliation, it publicly shames you by auto-posting a message to your Tumblr about your lack of dedication to your health. Public shaming for fitness is a campaign that we can see Mayor Bloomberg getting behind--as soon as he learns to code at least.

Mr. Pass

CornellNYC Tech, the applied sciences campus slated for Roosevelt Island, isn't wasting anytime establishing its ties to the tech industry. On Monday, Larry Page shlepped out to Chelsea (sans Google glasses, sadly) to announce that Google would gift the campus with 22,000 square feet of office space. And today the school named Greg Pass, Twitter's first-ever CTO, founding entrepreneurial officer. It's a much more heavyweight hire than your run-of-the-mill entrepreneur-in-residence.

Former Twitter board member Fred Wilson, for example, has lauded Mr. Pass' considerable virtues as a technological leader, architect, and recruiter. A serial entrepreneur, Mr. Pass was also cofounder and CTO at Summize before it was acquired by Twitter and started serving as an advisory board member at Obvious Corp after stepping down from Twitter last year. Before playing a pivotal role in scaling Twitter, he spent years as a system architect and software engineer at AOL.

In his new role, Mr. Pass will spearhead efforts to collaborate with the tech sector and work closely with Dan Huttenlocher, the dean of the new campus, to help the academic program "reflect an industry perspective," the school said in a press release. “They couldn't have made a better choice than Greg Pass to help establish the DNA of innovation from the beginning," added @Ev.

"I think that my main attraction that I’m drawing from Twitter is my hiring experience there," Mr. Pass told Betabeat by phone. "Half of my job, over the course of the three years, is putting the team together. That included interviewing probably a 1,000 engineers and hiring hundreds of them." Leading that effort helped him realize, "how great an impact entrepreneurial engineers had on the company." Scaling the team was a challenge, he said, "So when this unique opportunity came up to give back to my profession in a more fundamental way--trying to figure out creative ways to cultivate this type of entrepreneurial engineer that is providing a lot of value to tech right now, I really couldn't say no to that."

Mr. Pass, a Cornell alumni, has also been involved with Cornell's efforts from the get-go. "Even when I was still at Twitter, I was helping advise the proposal phase," in terms of strategy, mission, and ideas for partnerships, he told Betabeat by phone. "Especially after I left Twitter, I became more and more invested in the project."

His roots at Cornell also go deep. Twenty years ago, Dean Huttenlocher helped sponsor Mr. Pass when he worked as a researcher in Cornell's Robotics and Vision Lab. He commercialized his research on image search technology as cofounder of the startup ToFish, which was acquired by AOL.

At the campus, Mr. Pass said his focus will be on helping engineers, "develop entrepreneurial skills within the academic program," whether that's in terms of project work with tech companies or student and faculty research. To stay more nimble as an academic institution, Cornell has opted to focus on hubs like "health informatics" and "the built environment." Part of his work will also involve, "how to select hubs going forward as times change and industries change."

Mr. Pass has never lived in New York City before and will be moving here next month. "I don't see myself as bringing a West Coast sensibility," he said. "Every city has its own unique character and its own leading sectors and its own brand of creativity. So I think to each city its own. Part of challenge is going to be to fullfill New York’s promise, not to transplant some other city’s promise."

Will he be moving to Roosevelt Island? "Roosevelt Island won't open for five years," he said of the campus. "I'll be somewhere in Manhattan, probably downtown, not too far from the Google building to make my life easy."

(Cornell University)

It's easy to get the impression that literally everyone in New York City is thrilled by the prospect of the Roosevelt Island tech campus. But one population is less than thrilled, and for good reason. That's the long-term residents of Goldwater Hospital, which is due for demolition to make way for construction. DNAInfo spoke to several and found them less than reassured about their futures.

The city first announced that the hospital would close in 2010, long before Cornell-Technion won the tech campus competition. But the proposed location has provided a hard deadline for the relocation, and it's not yet entirely clear where some 400 patients are headed. And this isn't the kind of effort that necessarily goes better with a firm deadline. Advocacy group director Judy Wessler told DNAInfo that there are "a lot of moving pieces, if not worked out well, could be tragic for people." She added, "If the spaces are not available, if they’re not done right — if they’re overcrowded, not adequate or not appropriate— there could be havoc."

All this is exacerbated by the fact some patients have legal situations that could fairly be described as complicated. For example, Armand Xama was paralyzed almost immediately after immigrating to the United States. Because he only has Medicaid, not Social Security, he qualifies for a nursing home, not a less-intense solution like supportive housing. But that's not appealing to the 30-year-old, who doesn't suffer from any mental impairments.

Nor are Goldwater residents the only ones harboring doubts about these ambitious building projcts. Just last week, the Transport Workers Union raised hew and cry over the plan to sell 370 Jay Street for a second proposed applied sciences campus.

NYU's initial proposal for a tech campus at 370 Jay St.

UPDATE: Read our liveblog of the Mayor's press conference about the NYU's new Brooklyn campus here.

Well that was well-timed! Hours after The New Yorker posted a profile of Stanford that tore at old wounds about the innovation engine's decision to drop out of building an engineering campus in NYC--blame sour grapes or Seth Pinsky, depending on who you ask--the city is finally ready to make an announcement about a secondary initiative.

According to Mayor Bloomberg's schedule, it looks like the second-place winner is a bid from NYU and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly). In its initial proposal, NYU wanted to transform the derelict former MTA headquarters at 370 Jay Street into a Center for Urban Science and Progress. At 1pm this afternoon, the Mayor will be joining NYU President John Sexton to announce a partnership to create a new "applied sciences center in Downtown Brooklyn." 

A quick refresher: Back in December, when a joint submission from Cornell-Technion was named the winner of the New York City Economic Development Corporation's competition to build an applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island, Mayor Bloomberg also teased the possibility that a secondary winner would be named among the three remaining proposals: NYU (Downtown Brooklyn), Columbia (Manhattanville), and Carnegie Mellon (Brooklyn Navy Yard).

The only hangup? The entire $100 million grant from the city for the campus contest had been allotted to Cornell-Technion, meaning the new project (or projects, the city said they would love to build all three) would likely have to rely on philanthropic donations or some creative financing on the city's part in terms of incentives. That's probably why this announcement took months longer than expected.

It's unclear whether NYU's proposal, which also got hung up on the MTA's buyout price for 370 Jay St., will still be at the same location and cover the same scope as initially proposed. But we'll be live-blogging the presser and let you know as soon as we find out. Brooklyn politicians--and real estate developers!--have been lobbying hard for this to get approved, so expect plenty of self-congratulatory back-patting.

Stanford's proposal for Roosevelt Island

In this week's issue of The New Yorker, the illustrious Ken Auletta, who recently profiled Sheryl Sandberg's attempts to "upend Silicon Valley's male-dominated culture," looks at the Bay Area from a different perspective. This time, he analyzes how Stanford became "the farm system for Silicon Valley," and whether the "gold-rush mentality" among both Stanford's students and faculty is good for the university.

Tucked inside the story are also a number of details about why Stanford, which was widely considered a frontrunner to open a its first-ever second campus on Roosevelt Island, abruptly dropped its bid at the last minute.

In our post-mortem about the botched deal in December, Betabeat previously reported how Stanford balked at costly penalties for failure to meet deadlines, even if the factors were outside the university's control, such as toxicity on the Roosevelt Island site. Stanford wasn't the only institution whose legal teams threw up a red flag. Other universities that applied and those familiar with the city's development process cited an alarming vulnerability to legal action. Stanford appeared to be particularly insulted by last-minute attempts to pit Stanford against Cornell in an attempt to see which institution would make more concessions.

(Aggressive negotiating tactics and contracts with onerous demands in the city's favor have been a hallmark of Seth Pinsky's career as president of New York City Economic Development Corporation.)

Mr. Auletta's investigation offers more details and insights along those lines.

According to Mr. Auletta, Stanford President John Hennessy was pissed that the school was being held to impossible deadlines:

On December 16, 2011, Stanford announced that it was withdrawing its bid. Publicly, the university was vague about the decision, and, in a statement, Hennessy praised “the mayor’s bold vision.” But he was seething. In January, he told me that the city had changed the terms of the proposed deal. After seven universities had submitted their bids, he said, the city suddenly wanted Stanford to agree that the campus would be operational, with a full complement of faculty, sooner than Stanford thought was feasible.

Mr. Auletta cites "city lawyers," and not the Mayor's office as responsible for the millions of dollars in penalties sprung on Stanford during negotiations:

The city, according to Debra Zumwalt, Stanford’s general counsel and lead negotiator, added “many millions of dollars in penalties that were not in the original proposal, including penalizing Stanford for failure to obtain approvals on a certain schedule, even if the delays were the fault of the city and not Stanford. . . . I have been a lawyer for over thirty years, and I have never seen negotiations that were handled so poorly by a reputable party.” One demand that particularly infuriated Stanford was a fine of twenty million dollars if the City Council, not Stanford, delayed approval of the project. These demands came from city lawyers, not from the Mayor or from a deputy mayor, Robert Steel, who did not participate in the final round of negotiations with Stanford officials.

Deputy Mayor Robert Steel, who had "an agreeable conversation" with President Hennessy the same week Stanford dropped out, insists that there were no last-minute changes, but in fact schools were pitted against each other to see who would offer the city a better deal, Mr. Aulleta reports.

All the stipulations that Stanford now complains about, he says, were part of the city’s original package. Actually, they weren’t. In the city’s proposal request, the due dates and penalties were left blank. Seth Pinsky, the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, who was one of the city’s lead negotiators, says that these were to be filled in by each bidder and then discussed in negotiations. “The more aggressive they were on the schedule and the more aggressive they were on the amount, the more favorably” the city looked at the bid, Pinsky told me. In the negotiations, he said, he tried to get each bidder to boost its offer by alerting it of more favorable competing bids.

Along with responsibility for the toxicity of the Roosevelt Island site, Stanford was asked to shoulder penalties as high as $25 million for delays outside of its control:

At one point, Stanford asked about an ambiguous clause in the city’s proposal request: would the university have to indemnify the city if it were sued for, say, polluted water on Roosevelt Island? The city responded that the university would. According to Pinsky, city lawyers said that this was “not likely to produce significant problems,” and that other bidders did not object. To Pinsky and the city, these demands—and the twenty-million-dollar penalty if the City Council’s approval was delayed—were “not uncommon,” since developers often “take liability for public approvals.” To Stanford, the stipulations made it seem as if the goal posts were not fixed.

This may not be the end of Stanford's presence in New York City, however:

Jeff Koseff, who played golf with Hennessy within a few days of Stanford’s withdrawal, recalls, “He was already talking about what we could do next.” One venture that Hennessy was exploring, though there is as yet no concrete plan, is working with the City College of New York to establish a Stanford beachhead in Manhattan. Deputy Mayor Steel says, “I’d be ecstatic.” Still, a Stanford official is dubious: “John’s disillusionment with the city is pretty thorough.”

A partnership with City College was one facet's of Stanford's initial bid for the campus competition.

Mr. Huttenlocher

A source tells Betabeat that Mayor Bloomberg has a "big announcement" about the city's tech campus slated for his 11.30am appearance at Tumblr's 21st Street offices today.

Does that mean the New York City Economic Development Corporation is finally revealing a second-place winner for the campus competition? Nope! Although a decision was expected in January, city officials say they may have underestimated the time frame based on the ease of its negotiations with Cornell-Technion. (Stanford dropping out of the race probably streamlined the process as well, we imagine.) While the Roosevelt Island campus nabbed the city's entire $100 million grant, the EDC is optimistic that some kind of financing negotiations can be worked out to support one (or all!) of the remaining proposals: NYU in Downtown Brooklyn, Carnegie Mellon at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, or Columbia in Manhattanville.

In the meantime, we did get the early word on one big personnel decision as far as Cornell and Technion's $2 billion Roosevelt Island applied sciences extravaganza. Professor Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Cornell University’s Dean of Computing and Information Sciences, has been named Cornell Vice Provost and founding Dean of the new campus.

We first met Mr. Huttenlocher—at the Cornell Club, natch—when Betabeat was working on the first big feature about the campus back in September. Indeed, he has been spear-heading Cornell's ambassadorship to NYC, if you will. Back then, Mr. Huttenlocher, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, made a compelling case, even in the face of Standford's bold brand, for Cornell's more nimble structure, focusing on "interdisciplinary hubs focused on concepts like the mobile space, or built environment, or health informatics that involve along with the outside world. We came away with .edu stars in our eyes.

Along with Mr. Huttenlocher's appointment, Cathy Dove, who currently serves as associate dean in Cornell’s College of Engineering, will co-lead the campus as Vice President. And Technion Professor Craig Gotsman will serve as the founding director of the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute (TCII).

Here's the Mayor's full press release:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today announced that Professor Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Cornell University’s Dean of Computing and Information Sciences, has been named Cornell Vice Provost and founding Dean of the university’s historic tech campus, home of the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute. Cathy Dove, currently associate dean in Cornell’s College of Engineering, will co-lead the campus as Vice President, and Technion Professor Craig Gotsman will serve as the founding director of the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute. Mayor Bloomberg made the announcement at the headquarters of Tumblr, one of the City’s fastest-growing technology companies, was joined by Tumblr CEO David Karp, Dean Huttenlocher, Cathy Dove, New York City Economic President Seth Pinsky, Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne, Office of Media & Entertainment Commissioner Katherine Oliver and representatives from Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Bitly and YouTube.

“New York City is quickly becoming the center of the digital universe, and today’s announcements will help us get there,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “With this fantastic leadership team in place, the tech campus will help us attract and develop more talent to energize our growing tech sector. And our social media platforms will give New Yorkers the information they need on the channels they want to use.”

“Dan Huttenlocher and Cathy Dove have employed their extensive knowledge and expertise, as well as their acknowledged leadership skills, during every step of the development and promotion of our proposal, and they continue to drive our effort to bring the new campus to fruition for the people of New York,” said Cornell University President David Skorton. “And the addition of Professor Craig Gotsman as director of the campus’s Techion-Cornell Innovation Institute brings added luster to this impressive team. Cornell, Technion and the city are very lucky to have such talented people leading our exciting new campus.”

Huttenlocher, Dove and Gotsman were instrumental in formulating and promoting the winning proposal and working with the city during the selection process for the new state-of-the-art graduate campus, to be operated in partnership with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Inaugural instruction will begin in off-site locations in the city in September of this year, with groundbreaking scheduled for 2015 and on-campus operations slated to begin in 2017. Huttenlocher and Dove will oversee the formation of the environmentally sustainable campus, whose operational costs are expected to exceed $2 billion over 30 years; the building of the campus’s expert faculty, planned to be about 280 strong in 30 years; its highly selective graduate student population, targeted at about 2,500 by 2043; as well as capital construction of the 2 million square-foot campus. The campus’s innovative academic “hub” concept, which Huttenlocher helped develop, will feature curriculum and research organized across multiple disciplines and directed toward particular sectors of New York City’s economy.

As dean, Huttenlocher will have overall responsibility for all programmatic aspects of the new campus, including responsibility for the academic quality and direction of the campus’s hubs and their evolution over time. He will develop strategic plans for the most effective ways of working with companies and early stage investors in New York City, and he will lead the campus’ faculty recruitment and entrepreneurial initiatives. He also will serve as a member of the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute Joint Governance Board and oversee the Tech Campus Advisory Committee. Huttenlocher will report to Cornell’s provost, work closely with Cornell’s deans, including Cornell Engineering Dean Lance Collins, and he will serve as a member of Cornell’s senior leadership team. He also will retain his post as Cornell’s CIS dean, until a new dean is appointed.

As the Vice President for the new tech campus, Dove will be responsible for all development, outreach and operational aspects of the campus, including areas such as human resources, external and student relations, development and facilities, IT, marketing and communications, finances and outreach. She will serve as the campus’s lead on its facility construction team, oversee corporate relations, student services and lead community outreach and programming, including K-12 programs. She will report to Cornell’s provost, will lead the Operating Committee, and she will serve as a member of Cornell’s senior leadership team. Gotsman will lead the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute (TCII), a centerpiece of the Roosevelt Island campus, as its founding director. The TCII will confer dual Cornell/Technion Masters of Applied Sciences degrees, based on a curriculum with a unique emphasis on the application of sciences, entrepreneurship and management.

“Cornell and the Technion have outlined ambitious plans for a world-class applied sciences campus in the heart of New York City, and executing on those plans will require outstanding academic leaders like Daniel Huttenlocher, Cathy Dove and Craig Gotsman,” Deputy Mayor Steel said. “Congratulations to Presidents Skorton and Lavie and the entire Cornell and Technion communities on the selection of the NYC Tech leadership team.”

“With the selection of Cornell and the Technion, we were fortunate to find the perfect partners - two world-class institutions which together shared our vision of how to change the City’s economy forever,” said New York City Economic Development Corporation President Pinsky. “To fulfill this bold vision will require strong leadership, and there are no leaders better equipped for this challenge than Dan Huttenlocher, Cathy Dove and Craig Gotsman. With this team at the helm, the NYCTech campus will soon begin creating the new technologies and businesses that will ensure our place as the undisputed world capital of innovation.”

“We welcome the appointments of Professor Dan Huttenlocher and Cathy Dove, to which we add that of Technion Professor Craig Gotsman as Founding Director of the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute,” said Peretz Lavie, President of the Technion. “We have complete faith that this team can and will efficiently and professionally promote the ambitious program we have planned for New York City.”

“This is an unprecedented opportunity to build a new kind of university campus, focused on technology commercialization rooted in the very best academic research, with educational programs that tie fundamentals to practice, and strong ties to the tech sector of the city's economy,” said Huttenlocher. “We are already actively working towards identifying leased space for the start-up phase before we move to Roosevelt Island, gaining approvals for degree programs, involving local tech leaders in our planning, and preparing to hire world class faculty.”

“I am incredibly honored to be able to contribute to this game-changing enterprise that will have such a great impact on Cornell, the Technion and New York City,” said Dove. “It is especially meaningful to me as a Cornell alumna, who has always believed that Cornell should have a significant presence in New York City. I’m looking forward to working closely, not only with our faculty, staff and students, but with companies, alumni, our Technion partners and our New York City and Roosevelt Island neighbors. There is a lot of work to do, but I’m excited to be moving forward toward our shared goal.”

“The Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute will be dedicated to fulfilling Mayor Bloomberg’s far-reaching vision for the future of New York City as the high-tech capital of the world. The TCII will become a fertile breeding ground for engineers, innovators and entrepreneurs who will contribute to the city’s tech ecosystem, even before they graduate. The Technion is confident that its experience in building the Israeli high-tech sector will serve it well in New York City. Having a local partner as distinguished as Cornell University, can only guarantee a runaway success,” said Prof. Gotsman.

“Dan Huttenlocher’s leadership has taken Cornell’s Computing and Information Science department to new heights as one of the top programs in the world,” said Eric Grimson, chancellor of MIT. “Dan has a keen sense of how research and education can drive entrepreneurship and innovation, and I can think of no one better to lead the new tech campus going forward.”

“Dan Huttenlocher is an inspired choice to lead the new tech campus as he has excelled in both the academic world and the entrepreneurial world,” said Jeff Hawkins, Founder of Numenta, Palm, and Handspring. “The Tech Campus’ mission is to train the engineers and innovators who will continue to fuel New York City’s rise as a global technology leader. Knowing Dan and his talents I can think of no one better suited to achieve that goal.”

“Dan is the rare academic leader who knows not only how to cultivate great engineers and innovators, but also understands both the social and technical sides of tech entrepreneurship from his own years of experience working in the tech sector,” said John Seely Brown, Former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corp and past Director of its Palo Alto Research Center said. “Dan is a brilliant choice to lead the new tech campus forward as its founding Dean, and I am confident that his students and New York City itself will benefit from his unique approach.”

“Dan Huttenlocher is the perfect choice to lead the new technology campus,” said Rob Cook, VP of Advanced Technology, Pixar (Emeritus). “Today’s engineers need both an excellent education in technology and the practical business skills to make a difference in the real world. Dan excels in both areas: he is a brilliant and innovative academic researcher and also a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I’m confident that with Dan as its founding dean, the campus will become renowned for producing technology leaders.”

In addition to his post as Cornell’s dean of CIS, Huttenlocher holds the John P. and Rilla Neafsey Chair in Computing, Information Science and Business. He has been on the faculty at Cornell since 1988, leaving at various times to work in industry, including at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center , where he founded the Image Understanding Group and served on the senior management team, and at Intelligent Markets, a small financial technologies firm where he served as Chief Technology Officer. While his academic interests are rooted in computer science, particularly computer vision, he has worked in a number of other domains including autonomous vehicles, competing in the DARPA Urban Challenge, and analysis of online social networks. He has taught in both the Department of Computer Science and the MBA program at Cornell, and he has been recognized on several occasions for his excellence in teaching, including as the New York State Professor of the year in 1993 by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, and as a Stephen H. Weiss Fellow at Cornell in 1996. He has published a number of award winning scientific papers, was named a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation in 1990, and was honored as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2007. In 1998-99, Huttenlocher chaired the Cornell Task Force on Computing and Information Science, which led to the creation of CIS, for which he was Cornell’s second dean. In 2005-06, he also chaired Cornell’s Task Force on Wisdom in the Age of Digital Information. Huttenlocher currently serves on the board of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He received his bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan and his master’s and doctorate at MIT.

Dove most recently was associate dean in the Cornell College of Engineering. Previously she served as Associate Dean for MBA Programs and Administration at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and also served as director of Financial Management Services for the Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Throughout her tenure at Cornell, Dove has served on or led a number of institutional initiatives – most recently as co-chair of the university’s Budget Model Task Force. Prior to her arrival at Cornell, she served as Assistant Town Manager for Arlington, Mass.; as a financial analyst and marketing planner for Eli Lilly & Co.; and as a manager of Engineering Systems and Development for Anaren Inc.  She holds a B.S. from Georgetown University, an MBA from Cornell, and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

Prof. Gotsman joined the Technion in 1992. As Associate Dean for External Relations, he founded and led the Computer Science faculty’s Industrial Affiliates Program, a successful platform for promoting academic-industrial cooperation. In this capacity he conceived and developed an “Industrial Project” course, which allows students to perform software projects offered and supervised by industrial experts; and the “Lapidim” study program, which identifies and nurtures the next generation of high-tech leaders. He has founded and ran two start-up companies, one based on technology he developed at the Technion, and has consulted for numerous Fortune 100 companies. Prof. Gotsman holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was a visiting professor at Harvard University and ETH Zurich, and a research scientist at MIT. He has published more than 150 papers in the professional literature and has been awarded five U.S. patents.

Over the next six months, he said, Cornell plans to start a search to find "at least one university from Europe and as many as two from Asia" to boost the applied sciences program's prestige abroad.

“It’s a whole new model,” Fuchs said, adding that the campus will make Cornell the first American university to build a school in the United States with international schools. “We think about going elsewhere — there are many [American] universities that have campuses and partnerships overseas — but not about bringing [international universities] here to the U.S.”

The working motto seems to be "a rising tide lifts all boats," something Cornell president David Skorton said at the press conference announcing Cornell-Technion as the winner of the fierce competition to build on city-owned land.

“If we have more partners in this innovation institute, it raises the reputation, the ranking, the visibility, the prestige of Cornell in the home countries of those universities, just as it would raise their own prestige,” Fuchs said. “If we had a university from Asia, they’re going to have visibility — that’s why they’d be eager to do it.”

Although the move may be aimed at ensuring a competitive applicant pool, Mr. Fuchs emphasized it was not designed to help Cornell shoulder than $2 billion price tag for the 30-year project. He did admit, however, that other schools will “certainly bring resources indirectly.” Considering that the city is only chipping in $100 million, every little bit helps.

According to Mr. Fuchs, this cosmopolitan twist has been part of the plan all along, despite the fact that this wasn't discussed during the heated battle between Cornell and Stanford:

“If I remember correctly, in the agreement with the Technion we talk about creating a global innovation institute and inviting other members,” Fuchs said. “When anyone asks us about this, we certainly tell them.”

Ah, we see. It's just that no one bothered to ask the right questions. Makes you wonder, what else should we be asking Cornell . . .

NYU's proposed campus at 370 Jay St.

For months, Mayor Bloomberg has dangled the possibility of picking two winners for the city's tech campus competition. He even left the possibility open while announcing that the New York City Economic Development Corporation would give the full $100 million grant to Cornell-Technion to build an applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island. Now Crain's is reporting that between the remaining contestants, NYU's Downtown Brooklyn proposal may have "taken center stage" over Carnegie Mellon's Navy Yard campus and Columbia's Manhattanville proposal.

Hey, if the Fulton St. Mall can have its own Shake Shack, why shouldn't the M.T.A's derelict former headquarters on nearby 370 Jay St. be transformed into a Center for Urban Science and Progress?

Although Crain's says NYU, the M.T.A., and E.D.C. all want to make a deal to help revitalize Downtown Brooklyn, "but money is the sticking point."

Back in October, NYU was asking for $20 to $25 million from the city and pledged spending $450 million on the 200,000 sq. ft. space. Now that someone actually wants the blighted building that has frustrated officials for year, the M.T.A. is asking for more:

"NYU has asked the city for $20 million to help buy out the MTA, based largely on numbers thrown around during previous attempts to revive the beleaguered building, sources familiar with the proposal said. But the MTA's asking price has now ballooned to $50 million to $60 million."

As Crain's reports:

"The MTA controls the site via a master lease and has the right to stay in the building as long as it is using it. The 459,000-square-foot property contains vital communications equipment, and the negotiations hinge on just how much it would cost to move or replace it."

At the press conference announcing Cornell-Technion's big win, city officials seemed somewhat optimistic about the ability to find the financing for a second project, even without any of the $100 million in play. "Obviously the city budget funds other projects," said the source, "If there’s a way to make it work with other funding, that could be a possibility. If there’s philanthropy we can do, then we might be able to get somewhere."

UPDATE: Another City Hall source offered some clarification on the MTA's position. As we originally mentioned back in October, the $20 to $25 million that NYU pledged to build the center was allocated in part to cover, "infrastructure improvements and moving out old MTA equipment." The latter appears to be the real issue because the 459,000-square-foot property still contains vital communications equipment for the MTA.

“It’s pretty integral signalling equipment, it has to do with running the train lines,” said the source who believed the infrastructure was currently in use by the agency. "The tough piece of 370 Jay has been that that equipment is there." The source also noted that it wasn't so much that the cost "ballooned" as that estimates to relocate that equipment has varied through the years, including when the MTA was contemplating putting out an RFP to redevelop the building. "Clearly neither of those estimates was the city’s estimates," said the source, who also seemed optimistic about the ability to reach a deal with NYU and the MTA.

Even if NYU's Downtown Brooklyn project was selected as a second winner, that might not necessarily leave Columbia and Carnegie Mellon out. "I think we’re still working on creative ways to do all of them," said the source. " Even without the $100 million, we wondered? "There are other ways to create incentives for people to pursue these projects," the source offered obliquely.

data via the Wall Street Journal

There has been a lot of drama around the new engineering campus that Cornell and Technion will be be building on Roosevelt Island. But in the meantime New York's exisiting universities have been seeing strong growth in the number of students interested in studying computer science.

Columbia, NYU, Queens College and the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken all reported increases in enrolment for CS classes between 30-50 percent, and a increase in computer sciences majors of 10 and 12 percent at NYU and Columbia. The best part is that students, at least the one quoted in this article, are already beginning to gravitate to New York as a place to study because they see it as a springboard to a startup hub.

"When I was thinking about schools, I wanted to go somewhere that had a start-up ecosystem—in and around cities—but I wanted a place that wasn't unilaterally focused on technology as an engineering problem," Arvind Srinivasan, a Columbia sophomore from Fremont, California studying computer science. "New York is really the up-and-coming place because people who don't have traditional technology backgrounds are starting companies in completely different sectors and utilizing technology."

Another catalyst is the antipathy to the financial sector which has bubbled over as the Occupy Wall Street movement. Brainy quants who would once have aimed for a job at a big bank may be driven by politics to try something else.

But while the supply of CS students is growing, some in New York tech believe that's a red herring. "The problem is that NYC startups are basically unknown to students at MIT, CMU, Penn, and even (shockingly) to engineering students at NYU and Columbia (big props to HackNY for trying to fix this)," Mr. Dixon wrote on his blog. "I say this having been at dozens of events with East Coast students over the last year or so talking about startups. I’m constantly amazed that most of the students simply don’t realize startups are a viable option. What we have is primarily a marketing, not a supply, problem."

Fashion shows, pin up calendars and reality TV aren't enough marketing? We're kind of at a loss for how the local tech scene could be more self-promotional.

Those glittering solar arrays kind of make the boroughs to its left and right look dull by comparison, no?

Check out this week's Betabeat feature, a campus confidential on how Cornell beat Stanford to build a 2 million sq. ft. engineering mecca on Roosevelt Island.