Siegel PiTech PhD Impact Fellowship

For Students | For Organizations

Would you like to leverage your technical expertise in the public interest?

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.

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Eligibility, Timeline, and Application

The Siegel PiTech PhD Impact Fellowship provides Cornell University doctoral students with project matching and direct financial support as they embed within a community, NGO, foundation, or public sector organization.

The fellowship term is 12 weeks between June and August. Impact Fellows work 20 hours per week, to leave enough space in their schedules for independent thesis research.

We accept applications through 5 PM EST on February 5th, 2024. We select between 8-12 Impact Fellows per cohort.

How it works?

Read Organization Profiles & Projects
Familiarize yourself with participating organizations and their proposed projects.
Submit Application
Fill out the Fellowship application and specify which organizations you’re interested in learning more about.
Student Calls with Organizations
Talk to organizations during group meetings.
Student <> Organization Pairing
Find out if PiTech matched you for the summer.
Project Scoping
Define milestones and deliverables for your project.
Fellowship Term
June - August

Apply for the program

Program Details

We welcome Cornell PhD students from both Ithaca and NYC campuses, studying technical fields at Cornell Tech, Cornell’s Bowers College of Information Science, College of Engineering, or the Center for Applied Mathematics.

If selected for the fellowship, Impact Fellows receive a summer Graduate Research Assistantship (GRA) funded by the PiTech Initiative at Cornell Tech. As this is a standard GRA, the Fellowship need not count towards CPT.
Impact Fellows will additionally have access to the many resources offered by Cornell Tech, including a campus base and access to our extensive network of academics and researchers pursuing initiatives at the cutting edge of their scientific disciplines, as well as practitioners working across New York City's government agencies, nonprofits, and industry.
PiTech Impact Fellows become embedded with an organization for a 12-week term between June and August and typically work 20 hours per week, allowing time in their schedules for independent thesis research. This may fluctuate from week to week based on the specific needs of their projects.
The majority of Impact Fellowship partner organizations are based in New York City. Impact Fellows are not required to relocate to NYC for the duration of the fellowship, however, they are strongly encouraged to do so to fully take advantage of the resources offered at Cornell Tech.
Fellowship work may take place remotely, fully in-person, or a combination of the two. This will depend on the preferences of the student and organization and on the work arrangement students establish with their manager at the organization prior to the start of the fellowship. During the application period, students will learn each organization’s high-level preference for the type of work arrangement. Remote work from an international location is not possible.
Students will be expected to apply their technical expertise to a project that advances the public interest mission of their fellowship organization. The various projects call for a range of technical skills, including: data analytics, data visualization, machine learning, user-centered design, privacy and security, information architecture, product development, and others.
Students will be responsible for maintaining a relationship with their direct manager(s) at the organization and are expected to work proactively with the manager(s) for the duration of the fellowship to meet agreed-upon goals and milestones. Additionally, students will have periodic check-ins with the PiTech team for support and to ensure overall smooth progression of the fellowship.
At the end of the fellowship, students will be asked to produce a summary report or blog post to be featured on the PiTech website, and will be invited to stay involved in Cornell Tech’s growing PiTech community.
When applying for the Impact Fellowship, students may express interest in working with as many organizations as are participating in the fellowship. To assess interest, students will be given high-level information about the projects available at each organization, including the project’s subject-matter area, the problem the project is trying to solve, and the skills required of the student to complete the project successfully.
After submitting the application, students will be invited to ‘matching calls.’ The group matching calls are an opportunity for students to ask questions and talk to the organizations they are interested in.
Upon completion of all relevant matching calls, each student will be asked to rank the organizations they learned about in order of preference. The PiTech team will then match students with an organization based on a number of factors, including student interest and skills and organizations' needs. Prior to accepting the match and committing to a summer with the organization, students will be given the opportunity to speak in a 1:1 call with their future direct manager to make sure the match is a good fit.
Closer to the fellowship start date, students will work with their matched organization and the PiTech team to establish the specific scope of the summer project, including concrete milestones and deliverables. This ensures the greatest applicability of the project to both student skills and organization needs at the time of the fellowship. Students will work on one project at a time, unless otherwise agreed upon.

Apply for the PiTech PhD Impact Fellowship

PhD Impact Fellowship Reports

Spotlights

Communicating weather data when the stakes are high

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.

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

Supporting Block Party & NYC Community Boards )

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.

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.

Re-designing Medical Alerts for Nurses at NYC H+H

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.

Enhancing Permission Slip, a digital data privacy assistant by Consumer Reports: Unveiling Consumer Insights and Ensuring Robust Validation

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.

Workforce Modelling for Ithaca’s 2030 Building Electrification Goal

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.

Identifying and addressing usage disparities with the New York Public Library

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.

Unveiling NYC Policing Patterns through Data Visualization and Analysis

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.

Making Sense of Civic Voice Using Computer-Driven Analysis with the NYC Civic Engagement Commission

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.

The Siegel Public Interest Tech Impact Fellowship for PhD students in its third year

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!

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.

How Can People With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Be Supported With Computer Vision AI in the Future?

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.

Tech Entrepreneurialism As a Tool for Addressing the Needs of NYC’s Vulnerable Populations & Fostering Positive Social Impact

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.

Statistical modeling of New York City building construction times with the NYC Department of Design and Construction

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.

Identifying Scientific Names in Biodiversity Literature at New York Botanical Garden

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.

Aligning childcare with business objectives at Childcare Innovation Lab - women.nyc

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.

Improving IT Support Workflows at NYC Housing Authority

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?

Understanding How Companies Handle Data-Rights Requests with Consumer Reports

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.

Impact Fellowship 2022

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.

2021 PhD Impact Fellow: Briana Vecchione / Blue Ridge Labs @ Robin Hood

Briana Vecchione embedded with Blue Ridge Labs @ Robin Hood this past summer as one of our inaugural PiTech Impact Fellows. She worked with the early-stage social ventures selected for Blue Ridge Labs’ 2021 Catalyst accelerator program, which were Touchdown NYC, Communifi, UnlockEd, and Karen’s Club.

Summer 2021 PhD Impact Fellows

Investigating Monetization of Extremists Online with the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism

Addressing Economic Inequality in NYC through Social Impact Tech Research at Blue Ridge Labs

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

Work with us