A pair of student groups based in the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science have each received the 2022 Student Organization Award from the Cornell Engineering Alumni Association.

The Underrepresented Minorities in Computing (URMC) and Hack4Impact groups were honored during an awards dinner hosted by Cornell Engineering on Friday, April 29. 

Founded in 2016 and with more than 150 members, URMC aims to promote diversity within the computing fields and foster an environment that empowers tech-minded underrepresented minorities through career development, community building, and academic support. URMC hosts numerous events throughout the semester, including faculty lunches, weekly office hours, social outings, and lectures. Company sponsors include ThoughtWorks, Jane Street, Bloomberg, Capital One, Meta, and Uber.

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Cornell Hack4Impact connects student software developers with nonprofits and other socially responsible businesses to develop powerful new tools for social change. More than 25 Cornell undergraduate students so far have worked with local organizations in New York state to implement technical solutions to socially impactful problems. Partnering entities include Correctional Association of New York, Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit (TCAT), and Habitat for Humanity, among others.

“Societal problems are increasingly global in nature and cannot be solved by any one discipline,” said Aditya Vashistha, assistant professor of information science and faculty director of Hack4Impact. “The club enables students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to come together to address ‘real’ needs of local organizations. Through the club activities, students gain rich hands-on experience, learn the challenges that organizations face when engaging underserved communities, and train to be the leaders in designing technologies for diverse communities.”

By Tom Fleischman for the Cornell Chronicle

Cornell Tech researchers have developed a mixed-reality (XR) driving simulator system that could lower the cost of testing vehicle systems and interfaces, such as the turn signal and dashboard.

Through the use of a publicly available headset, virtual objects and events are superimposed into the view of participants driving unmodified vehicles in low-speed test areas, to produce accurate and repeatable data collection about behavioral responses in real-world driving tasks.

Doctoral student David Goedicke is lead author of “XR-OOM: MiXed Reality Driving Simulation With Real Cars For Research and Design,” which he will present at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI 2022 conference, April 30-May 5 in New Orleans.

The senior author is Wendy Ju, associate professor of information science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion, and a member of the information science field at Cornell. Hiroshi Yasuda, human-machine interaction researcher at Toyota Research Institute, also contributed to the study.

This work is an offshoot of research Ju’s lab conducted in 2018, which resulted in VR-OOM, a virtual-reality on-road driving simulation program. This current work takes that a step farther, Goedicke said, by combining video of the real world – known as “video pass-through” – in real time, with virtual objects.

“What you’re trying to do is create scenarios,” he said. “You want to feel like you’re driving in a car, and the developer wants full control over the scenarios you want to show to a participant. Ultimately, you want to use as much from the real world as you can.”

This system was built using the Varjo XR-1 Mixed Reality headset, along with the Unity simulation environment, which previous researchers demonstrated could be usable for driving simulation in a moving vehicle. XR-OOM integrates and validates these into a usable driving simulation system that incorporates real-world variables, in real time.

“One of the issues with traditional simulation testing is that they really only consider the scenarios and situations that the designers thought of,” Ju said, “so a lot of the important things that happen in the real world don’t get captured as part of those experiments. (XR-OOM) increases the ecological validity of our studies, to be able to understand how people are going to behave under really specific circumstances.”

One challenge with XR versus VR is the faithful rendering of the outside world, Goedicke said. In mixed reality, what’s on the video screen needs to precisely match the outside world.

“In VR, you can trick the brain really easily,” he said. “If the horizon doesn’t quite match up, for instance, it’s not a big problem. Or if you’re making a 90-degree turn but it was actually more like 80 degrees, your brain doesn’t care all that much. But if you try to do this with mixed reality, where you’re incorporating actual elements of the real world, it doesn’t work at all.”

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Doctoral student David Goedicke sits behind the wheel of the Fiat virtual simulation vehicle, inside the Tata Center at Cornell Tech.

To test the validity of their method, the researchers designed an experiment with three conditions: No headset (Condition A); headset with video pass-through only (Condition B); and headset with video pass-through and virtual objects (Condition C). 

The participants were asked to perform several stationary tasks, including starting the vehicle, adjusting seat and mirrors, fastening safety belt, and verbally describing which dashboard lights are visible. Participants were also asked to perform several low-speed driving tasks, including left and right turns, slalom navigation and stopping at a line. The drivers in conditions A and B had to navigate around actual physical cones, placed 8 feet apart; those in Condition C saw superimposed cones in their headsets.

Most participants successfully completed all cockpit tasks, with most of the failed attempts attributable to unfamiliarity with the vehicle. Most also were successful in the driving tasks, with slalom navigation being most difficult for all, regardless of condition.

This success validates the potential, Ju said, of this technology as a low-cost alternative to elaborate facilities for the testing of certain onboard vehicle technologies.

“This kind of high-resolution, mixed-reality headset is becoming a lot more widely available, so now we’re thinking about how to use it for driving experiments,” Ju said. “More people will be able to take advantage of these things that will be commercially available and inexpensive really soon.”

Other co-authors included Sam Lee, M.S. ’21; and doctoral students Alexandra Bremers and Fanjun Bu.

This research was supported by the Toyota Research Institute.

This article originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle

By Tom Fleischman from the Cornell Chronicle

Gifts totaling $10 million – $5 million from Steve Conine ’95 and his wife Alexi Conine ’96, and $5 million from Niraj Shah ’95 and his wife Jill Shah – will support the construction of a leading-edge new building for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

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Nirah Shah and Steve Conine, co-founders of Wayfair.

The combined gift, led by the co-founders of the online home-goods retailer Wayfair, helps bolster growth of the college and supports increasing student demand and interest in computing and information science. Enrollment in Cornell Bowers CIS has grown sixfold over the past decade, with an anticipated 2,000 majors this year in the college’s disciplines.

Plans for the building – to be constructed adjacent to Gates Hall, at the corner of Campus and Hoy roads – were announced last December, along with the gift from alumna Ann S. Bowers ’59 establishing Cornell Bowers CIS. When completed, the building will enable Cornell Bowers CIS to both support its rising enrollment and hire additional faculty to advance its innovative, cross-disciplinary teaching and research.

“Niraj and Steve have made a massive mark in both the technology and online retail spaces,” President Martha E. Pollack said. “We are very proud that their Cornell educations have taken them to such heights, and are extremely grateful for their generosity as we move forward with plans for the construction of a much-needed new building at Cornell Bowers CIS.”

“Steve and Niraj are remarkable young entrepreneurs helping to positively integrate technology into millions of people’s daily lives and homes,” said Kavita Bala, dean of Cornell Bowers CIS. “They are an inspiration to the entire tech community, especially our students who are aspiring founders and entrepreneurs.”

Shah and Conine graduated with degrees in engineering, but it was an entrepreneurship course taught by David J. BenDaniel they both took their senior year that changed the trajectory of their lives. The experience of writing a business plan in that class altered Shah’s plans to attend graduate or law school, and Conine’s plan to join the furniture business his mother founded.

“The time that Niraj and I spent as engineering students at Cornell provided the foundation for so many things, from meeting each other in the dorms and starting our first business together, to the Wayfair journey that’s developed since,” Conine said.

They founded CSN Stores (now Wayfair) in 2002, running it out of a spare bedroom in Conine’s Boston home. They rebranded it as Wayfair nine years later; the company, which went public in 2014, now employs nearly 16,000 people and generated $14.1 billion in revenue in 2020.

“The education Cornell provided me was world-class,” Shah said. “My hope is that, with this gift, Cornell can continue to provide students with the knowledge, tools and skills they need to excel in an increasingly complex world. The future of Cornell and its students is bright, and I am honored to contribute to the future of a university which played such an important role in shaping mine.”

Shah was included in Fortune Magazine’s 40 Under 40 in 2013, and has won the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award. He also serves on the board of Massachusetts Competitive Partnership and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. He’s a member of the Entrepreneurship at Cornell Advisory Council, and serves on the Cornell Tech Council.

Conine is on the board of directors of CarGurus, a leading global online automotive marketplace, and is on the Entrepreneurship at Cornell Advisory Council as well as the Cornell Bowers CIS Advisory Council.

Both Shah and Conine were named 2018 Cornell Entrepreneurs of the Year.

Shah met Conine more than 30 years ago, when both attended a six-week Cornell summer program for high school students. Then as freshman engineering students, they ended up in the same dorm, just a few doors apart – and a professional and personal partnership was born.

“When I look back,” Steve Conine said, “it’s clear that our experience at Cornell played a key role in the success we have today. I’m proud to be able to give back and contribute to the next generation of students.”

This article first appeared at the Cornell Chronicle on September 28, 2021.

A transformative gift from Ann S. Bowers ’59 – a Silicon Valley champion and longtime philanthropist – will establish the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, supporting Cornell’s preeminence in these fields.

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Ann S. Bowers ’59, whose gift will establish a new college of computing.

Her nine-figure commitment will provide the enabling support for the construction of a new building for the Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS). The building will accommodate sorely needed growth in CIS, where half of all Cornell undergraduates take at least one class and enrollment is increasing at a pace unmatched anywhere at the university. It will also ultimately provide significant endowment support for faculty and students in CIS.

Bowers led human resources at Intel Corporation in the 1970s and was one of Apple’s first vice presidents in the 1980s. She spent her career developing and fostering an environment where technologists could thrive. It is thus especially meaningful that her gift supports CIS at Cornell, which, when created 21 years ago, was one of the nation’s first programs to combine computer science, with its emphasis on technology, and information science, with its focus on the ways technology impacts humanity.

Today, CIS also incorporates statistics and data science, and faculty from those three departments will make up the new college. Students who pursue its majors will apply to Cornell through other colleges, as they do now.

“Ann’s generosity and her passion for nurturing scholarship have already touched the lives of countless Cornellians,” President Martha E. Pollack said. “This new gift creates so many exciting possibilities for our faculty and students to learn and to create knowledge in one of the best programs of computing and information science in the world – one that has always emphasized both the design and creation of technology, and an understanding of its social impact. The Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science will be a fitting tribute to Ann’s many achievements.”

In addition to her professional accomplishments, Bowers has been an active philanthropist for many years. After the death of her husband, Robert Noyce, in 1990, the Noyce family established The Noyce Foundation, where Ann chaired the board. She has also been a longtime dedicated volunteer and generous benefactor for Cornell, giving more than $20 million over three decades.

Her influential gifts have included support for the construction of Gates Hall – CIS’s current home – as well as for Cornell faculty and students in the liberal arts, science, technology, engineering and math, including endowed professorships and research scholarships. She served as trustee and a member of the President’s Council of Cornell Women and numerous Cornell advisory boards. She chaired the Cornell Silicon Valley Advisors, where she passionately sought to galvanize the university’s presence in her Bay Area community.

The Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science will be a fitting tribute to Ann’s many achievements.

“Ann’s love for Cornell, her experience during the foundational days of Silicon Valley, her commitment to education in math and science – to me this gift is a lovely coalescing of the many different strands of her life,” said Bowers’s friend and fellow alumni volunteer Rebecca (Beckie) Robertson ’82, who serves on the Cornell Board of Trustees and the Cornell Engineering Council, and worked with Bowers through the Cornell Silicon Valley Advisors. “She’s a very generous leader who cares deeply about mentoring the next generation.”

The new college will be the first at Cornell named for a woman – a fitting honor for a college with a female dean, Kavita Bala, professor of computer science; at a university led by a female president, Pollack, who is also a computer scientist; and where 43% of CIS majors are women, far above the national average.

“The creation of CIS was 20 years ahead of its time. We believed computing and information technology would have a profound impact on life and society, and our unique multidisciplinary structure now serves as a model to other academic institutions,” Bala said. “This is an exciting time in technology, with amazing opportunities and hard problems. This incredibly generous gift will propel Cornell to lead the way in addressing the technological and societal challenges of our time.”

Events celebrating the gift and the new college are being planned for next year.

This story, written by Melanie Lefkowitz, originally appeared at the Cornell Chronicle on December 17, 2020.