Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute: A Change in Grad Tech Education

As interested as I am in the opening of the new Cornell Tech campus in New York, I'chiliad simply as intrigued past the JacobsTechnion-Cornell Institute—a joint venture of Cornell and the Technion-State of israel Institute of Technology—which is operating as an contained entity integrated within the larger Cornell Tech curriculum. What makes the Jacobs Institute then interesting is its novel approach to graduate education, which is more cantankerous-disciplinary and more integrated with industry than traditional programs.

As role of this week's opening, I had a chance to talk most the school and its philosophy with its director, Ron Brachman, as well as with Technion President Peretz Lavie. (Disclosure: I've been a long-time supporter of the Technion.)

Brachman explained that the Jacobs Plant offers a ii-year, dual-caste Master's programme, in which students are function of specific inter-disciplinary "hubs," and will obtain degrees from both Cornell and Technion. This is different from the more than traditional graduate Primary'due south degrees that are the focus of the rest of the Cornell Tech program. Brachman noted that the Jacobs Establish currently accounts for some 75 of the about 260 students at Cornell Tech, and the plan is to keep that number to between one-third and i-fourth of students at the campus every bit the institution grows.

The Jacobs Plant currently has two hubs, Continued Media and Health Tech, with a third hub planned, tentatively called Urban Life. Brachman explained that these hubs were part of the original proposal for the NYC Applied Sciences and Engineering campus competition, and highlight areas where the school believes that "the application of digital technology will make a quantum difference in industries of central importance to New York City (and the world)." He continued, adding that "New York Urban center is the media centre of the world and an international leader in healthcare," and that both of these fields are changing rapidly considering of the enabling power of digital technology.

While Cornell Tech is emphasizing interdisciplinary work, Brachman said the Jacobs Institute is taking an fifty-fifty deeper arroyo, looking for students with cross-disciplinary skills and non-traditional backgrounds.

This interdisciplinary focus was part of the original vision for the joint venture, Lavie said. In higher didactics in the hereafter, "crossing boundaries will be essential," he said, and added that he believes every university will have to follow the same road every bit the Jacobs Establish. "The fourth industrial revolution will exist based on cantankerous-disciplinary fields of cognition," he said.

When he was initially approached to make the Technion office of the proposal, Lavie said he was interested because academic education has become global and he wanted the school to have a more global presence. (More recently, it announced a partnership for the Guangdong Technion-Israel Found of Technology, in China.)

Lavie called the deal with Cornell a "win/win/win" for both universities and the city. He noted that Cornell is known for its excellence in research, and said Technion and its graduates "were behind the phenomenon known as 'Startup Nation,'" turning Israel from a country known for Jaffa oranges into one that has a world-renowned high-tech ecosystem. Lavie noted that Technion has a lot of experience not but in supporting applied inquiry, but also in commercializing research projects and interacting with manufacture.

Brachman noted that Jacobs functions in part as a fully-integrated slice of Cornell Tech, and that "Jacobs students learn and train together with all Cornell Tech students in our Studio curriculum." Merely being independent volition enable the plant to experiment, and to effort out-of-the-box approaches to instruction, research, and entrepreneurship. "We share much of our philosophy with all of Cornell Tech, but focus more attentively on some of these elements, and as the experimental trailblazer, dare to do assuming things that can be adopted by Cornell Tech in one case they are proven in practice," he said.

As an example, the Jacobs Establish volition likewise include a Runway Startup Postdoc Plan, in which post-docs are actively focused on starting their own companies.

While the Cornell Tech campus is new, the program and the Jacobs Institute have been running for a few years out of a space in the Google building in Manhattan. Along the way, students have created a number of quite interesting projects. For example, Pallette is a device that fits similar a mouth guard and enables people to control everything from wheelchairs to dwelling house appliances to video games, all past moving their tongues. Another project created a mobile app designed to aid motorcycling health care workers in Kingdom of lesotho, Africa, digitally track medical samples they collect. As Brachman notes, transporting blood samples and patient records in challenging terrain and betwixt far-flung villages and hospitals and labs can be a life-saving service.

While I was on campus I also had the chance to talk with Ari Juels, a Jacobs professor and co-director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrency and Contracts, who has worked with his students on Town Crier, an authenticated data feed for smart contracts that is certainly interesting.

While many universities are at present focusing on commercializing their research and encourage entrepreneurship, the Jacobs Institute and Cornell Tech in general seem to exist taking this to a new level, with the tightest focus on these efforts I've seen. It's a very interesting approach, and ane that may well bear witness widely influential in graduate technology pedagogy.

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