Columbia Entrepreneurship

It's About Damn Time: An Evening with Arlan Hamilton
2018-10-29 18:30 - 20:00 UTC
Less than 10% of all venture capital deals go to women, people of color, and LGBTQ founders. Other venture capital investors see this as a pipeline problem. Arlan Hamilton sees it as the biggest opportunity in investment that no one is talking about.
The Columbia Organization of Rising Entrepreneurs (CORE) will be welcoming Arlan onto campus tonight at 6:30pm in the Lerner Cinema for a fireside chat on Arlan’s journey and vision for the stronger and more diverse future of venture investing and entrepreneurship.
With her venture firm, Backstage Capital, and a new $36 million fund for black female founders, Arlan is changing entrepreneurship in the U.S by investing in high-potential founders who are of color, women, and/or LGBTQ. Arlan built Backstage Capital from the ground up, while homeless. Arlan herself identifies as a Black queer woman of color.

Event: HackATL
2018-10-26 - 2018-10-28
OPEN TO ALL STUDENTS
RSVP HERE
Since 2013, HackATL has attracted thousands of students from top undergraduate programs across the United States to build a business in 48 hours and pitch it to judges, angel investors, and venture capitalists. Students learned from and interacted with leading companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services who have sponsored us in the past, and we are excited to invite you to join us at HackATL 2018.
This year, participants will build ideas in one of the four categories – Technology, Health & Wellness, Social Innovation, and Arts & Entertainment – as we provide workshops in business, design, and technology to help you solve the world’s most pressing issues. Whether it be solving a lethal disease using AI, extracting energy from trees, or building an app for world peace – HackATL 2018 is the opportunity for you to explore next generation entrepreneurship amidst the brightest minds in the Southeast, as well as win up to $10,000+ worth of prizes to bring your startup to life.

How to Apply:
Application Link: hackatl.org/apply
Application Deadline: Sunday, September 30th
Location: Emory University, Goizueta Business School

Health Tech Assembly Fall Social
2018-10-25 18:00 - 21:00
OPEN TO ALL COLUMBIANS
RSVP HERE
Join us in our Fall Networking Social on Thursday Oct. 25th, 6:00pm at Arts&Crafts Beer Parlor Morningside Heights.
Come and talk to people enthusiastic about Health Technology and enjoy food (on us). Find team members, enjoy snacks, and more!

Columbia Giving Day
2018-10-24
GIVE HERE ON OCTOBER 24
Columbia Entrepreneurship is in the business of helping brilliant Columbian innovators make a positive impact on the world. Your generous gift directly supports these Columbian entrepreneurs as they plan, design, prototype, fund, and launch their ventures. To support all Columbia student and alumni entrepreneurs from all schools across campus, choose COLUMBIA ENTREPRENEURSHIP from the available lists of funds.

Alexander Osterwalder "How to Build Invincible Companies"
2018-10-23 18:30 - 20:00 | Columbia Startup Lab, 69 Charlton, New York
Interactive Lecture-Workshop on Corporate Innovation
“How to Build Invincible Companies”
With Internationally Recognized Thought Leader on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Dr. Alexander Osterwalder
author of
“Business Model Generation” and “Value Proposition Design”
Tuesday, October 23
6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
(doors open at 6:00 p.m.)
Columbia Startup Lab
in the WeWork SoHo West Building 69 Charlton at Varick, NYC
Register Today!
hosted by
Columbia University Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Design
at
The Columbia Startup Lab
Join Alexander Osterwalder, one of the world’s most influential proponents of business model innovation for a highly interactive, lecture-workshop. Learn new frameworks for how large companies innovate through rapid experimentation with business models and value propositions. This hands-on experience will provide sneak previews and insights into the rough content of Mr. Osterwalder’s forthcoming book “Invincible Companies” (Nov 2019).
What You Can Expect to Learn:

What organizations need to do to survive and thrive in the rapidly changing business dynamics of today’s world.
How to design an innovation culture, innovation portfolios, and the corresponding organizational structures, while remaining world class at managing the existing business.
How to work with Business Model Mechanics that allow established multinationals to compete on better business models rather than just compete on new products, technologies, and price.

Register Today!
Sliding-scale workshop fee
$10 Columbia Alumni
$25 General Admission
Alex Osterwalder is co-founder of Strategyzer, an innovation powerhouse that helps organizations develop growth engines, better customer understanding, more attractive value propositions and powerful business models. Alex is the author of “Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers” and “Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want”and is No. 7 on the Thinkers50 list of leading management Thinkers in the world”

[Full Bio]
One of the world’s most influential proponents of business model innovation and value proposition design, Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder provides a framework for large companies and startups to innovate by rapidly experimenting with new business models and value propositions. He is co-founder of Strategyzer, an innovation powerhouse that helps organizations develop growth engines, better customer understanding, more attractive value propositions and powerful business models via online applications and blended online/offline courses.
Osterwalder invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, Culture Map, and Business Portfolio Map, to help business people with practical tools to help address important strategic jobs. He simplifies the strategy development process, turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. As a result, a better language for identifying and communicating value is created and disseminated throughout an organization. Osterwalder’s talks – which illuminate the application of these practical tools with current market examples – consistently rank first or second among his peers at global conferences. By punctuating his informative speeches with humor and interactive exercises, Osterwalder establishes a deep and direct connection with audiences ranging from five to 5,000 and beyond, commanding high levels of participation, engagement and enthusiasm. His speeches further reveal how his business model and value proposition frameworks allow companies to grasp and maintain a competitive advantage in the midst of a crowded, or previously uncharted, industry.
A passionate entrepreneur, in 2010, Osterwalder co-founded Strategyzer, a leading innovation powerhouse that helps organizations develop growth engines, improve customer understanding, and establish more attractive value propositions and business models. His world-renowned Business Model Canvas is trusted by more than five million business practitioners from leading global companies, such as Coca-Cola, GE, Mastercard, Ericsson, Fujitsu, 3M, Intel and Microsoft, and is outlined in his international best-seller, “Business Model Generation” (Wiley, 2010), which was named among the 12 best business books of all time by USA Today. His second book, “Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want” (Wiley, 2014), continues the conversation by addressing how to find a better fit between a product and its intended market.
Osterwalder won the 2015 strategy award from Thinkers50 and currently ranks #7 among the top 50 business thinkers of the world. In 2013, he won the European Union’s inaugural Innovation Luminary Award. A frequent keynote speaker at Fortune 500 companies, Osterwalder travels the world discussing his ideas and strategies at leading universities such as Wharton, Stanford, Berkeley, IESE, MIT, KAUST and IMD. He holds a doctorate from HEC Lausanne, Switzerland, and is a founding member of The Constellation, a global not-for-profit organization aimed at eliminating HIV/AIDS and Malaria.

Studio Hours at the Design Studio (Open Collaboration Time)
2018-10-23 14:00 - 16:00, 2018-10-09 02:00 - 16:00, 2018-09-25 14:00 - 16:00
OPEN TO ALL IN THE COLUMBIA COMMUNITY
Do you have an idea and want to get personal design thinking feedback from the Columbia Entrepreneurship Design Studio? During Studio Hours, teams or individuals are invited to discuss their projects or ideas one-on-one with human-centered designers in the Studio. Teams of Columbia affiliates are also welcome to use the studio space for working independently on their entrepreneurial projects.

DEADLINE: PropTech Challenge Presented By REBNY (Funding)
2018-10-16
Build cutting-edge software solutions for real world challenges faced by NYC’s real estate market.
Developers are invited to build cutting-edge solutions in one of the following categories: Blockchain, Operations & Maintenance, Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC) & Development, or Brokerage.
– Prizes: Up to $50,000 in cash and exposure
– Deadline: October 16, 2018
Learn more and register at proptech.devpost.com

Information Session: The 2019 EdTech Design Challenge | Brazil
2018-10-15 18:00 - 20:00
OPEN TO ALL COLUMBIA STUDENTS
REGISTER FOR INFO SESSION HERE
Held at the Columbia Entrepreneurship Design Studio: 490 Riverside Drive

The 2019 Ed Tech Design Challenge semester-long design challenge where 12 Columbia University students from across disciplines will work with clients solving deeply entrenched K-12 education challenges in Brazil.
Includes sponsored trip to Sao Paulo, Brazil in January 2019
+
14 week SIPA design course @ the Design Studio
Teaching Team: Sarah Holloway (SIPA) and Joseph Heritage & Adam Royalty (The Columbia Entrepreneurship Design Studio)
Applications are due October 31
Apply here!

Check out last year’s 2017-2018 EdTech Design Challenge Cohort

Truth-Seeking in the Age of Disinformation
2018-10-12 13:00 - 14:30
Friday, October 12, 2018
1:00PM – 2:30PM
Pupin Hall, Room 428

“Truth-Seeking in the Age of Disinformation”

Abstract: Given the constantly growing proliferation of false claims online in recent years, there has been also a growing research interest in automatically distinguishing false rumors from factually true claims. In this talk, we will present several related problems. First, in the context of investigative journalism, we will address the problem of automatically identifying which claims in a political debate are most worthy and should be prioritized for fact-checking. We will then present a general-purpose deep learning framework for fully automatic fact checking using external sources, which taps the potential of the entire Web as a knowledge source to confirm or reject a claim. We will further extend this framework to the context of community question answering, where the goal is to decide whether an answer to a factual question is factually true or false. We will also cover some related problems such as stance detection, trust-worthiness estimation for Web sites, political ideology, bias and propaganda detection, as well as finding seminar users and opinion manipulation trolls in news community forums.

Bio: Dr. Preslav Nakov is a Senior Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU. His research interests include computational linguistics and natural language processing, machine translation, question answering, fact-checking, sentiment analysis, lexical semantics, Web as a corpus, and biomedical text processing.

At QCRI, he leads a project whose aim is to develop a news aggregation application to limit the effect of fake news, propaganda and media bias by helping users step out of their bubble and achieve a healthy news diet. He is also a co-PI of an MIT-QCRI collaboration project on Arabic Speech and Language Processing for Cross-Language Informatio n Search and Fact Verification, and he was a co-PI of another MIT-QCRI collaboration project on Speech and Language Processing for Arabic (2013-2016).

Preslav Nakov received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley (supported by a Fulbright grant and a UC Berkeley fellowship), and a MSc degree from the Sofia University. He was a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore, a honorary lecturer in the Sofia University, and a research staff in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Foundations for Research Computing Distinguished Lecture Series: Dr. Lorena Barba, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, George Washington University
2018-10-11 16:00 - 18:00
OPEN TO ALL

REGISTER HERE

Thursday, October 11, 2018
4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Lecture
5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Reception
Brown Institute | 2nd Floor, Pulitzer Hall (2950 Broadway)

Lorena A. Barba is an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She holds a PhD in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology and BSc/PEng degrees in mechanical engineering from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Chile. Her research includes computational fluid dynamics, high-performance computing, computational biophysics, and animal flight.

An international leader in computational science and engineering, she is also a long-standing advocate of open source software for science and education, and she is well known for her courses and open educational resources. She was a recipient of the 2016 Leamer-Rosenthal Award for Open Social Sciences, and in 2017, was nominated and received an honorable mention in the Open Education Awards for Excellence of the Open Education Consortium.

Prof. Barba received the NSF Faculty Early CAREER award (2012), was named CUDA Fellow by NVIDIA Corp. (2012), is an awardee of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) First Grant program (2007), is an Amelia Earhart Fellow of the Zonta Foundation (1999) and a leader in computational science and engineering internationally. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the NumFOCUS non-profit, and a member of the editorial board for IEEE/AIP Computing in Science and Engineering, The Journal of Open Source Software, and The ReScience Journal.

Information Session: Lab-to-Market Accelerators | Life Sciences
2018-10-11 10:00 - 11:00
Join the information session at Columbia University Medical Center, 622 W 168th Street, PH10-204 (Conf Room)
BRINGING YOUR IDEAS TO LIFE…
Moving cutting-edge university research out of the lab to benefit society
Accelerator programs aim to catalyze innovation via support to interdisciplinary engineer/scientist/clinician teams, with the goal of increasing the potential for private investment towards continued product development, clinical testing, and, ultimately, improved patient care and healthcare outcomes.
Selected teams work closely with business, legal and regulatory experts to define commercially-relevant hypotheses for research towards technical and business proof-of-concepts.
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
Project funding, education and support for interdisciplinary teams working to advance innovative ideas with the potential to positively impact health outcomes.
THERAPEUTICS / DRUG DEVELOPMENT
Accelerating Cancer Therapeutics | ACT
Translational Therapeutics Resource | TRx
MEDICAL TECHNOLOGIES / DEVICES
Biomedical Technology Accelerator | BiomedX (formerly Columbia-Coulter)

Immigration 101 for Entrepreneurs and Startups
2018-10-10 13:00 - 15:00
OPEN TO ALL COLUMBIANS
RSVP HERE
On Wednesday October 10th at 1:00 PM, please join Columbia Lab-to-Market Accelerator Network (L2M) and Najia Khalid, Co-chair of Wiggin and Dana’s Immigration and Nationality Law and Compliance Practice Group, for an in-depth workshop on immigration law essentials for entrepreneurs and startups. Whether you are looking to work or hire in the United States, this training will provide an overview of immigration topics including tips on how to read, navigate, and evaluate financial documents, which are fundamental to various employment-based immigration cases. Food and refreshments will be served!

APPLICATION DEADLINE, 8 AM: Design Your Future
2018-10-08 08:00
OPEN TO ALL COLUMBIANS
APPLY HERE
The future can feel uncertain, so we’ve created Design Your Future as a three-session program where students learn to apply design to their careers and to life after graduation. The goal of this program is to help you to better navigate your career and life choices in the face of uncertainty.
This can be both an exciting and unnerving time.
What if you discover that your new job isn’t for you?
What happens if you start to drift away from the things you feel passionate about?
What trajectory is right for you?
In these interactive, emotive, and highly engaging sessions you will use design principles to prototype potential life trajectories.
APPLY HERE
Important Dates & Times:
Applications Open: August 29th, 8am
Applications Close: October 8th, 8am
Accepted Applicants Notified: October 10th, by 5pm
Classes held for three consecutive Tuesdays:
October 16 —11:00am to 1:00pm
October 23 —11:00am to 1:00pm
October 30 —11:00am to 1:00pm

Urban Works Challenge: India (Ideation)
2018-10-06 09:30
Key Dates: Tues Oct 2, Sat Oct 6
Register here: https://urbanworksindia2018.eventbrite.com

The Urban Works Design Challenge aims to generate innovative interdisciplinary technology solutions that could have an immediate impact on the future of work spaces in urban settings in India. Teams selected to continue will win a trip to Mumbai in January 2019. We invite students from all schools at the university to participate in this exciting opportunity to address a complex and future-facing problem. Individuals and teams from all backgrounds are welcome. Bring your passion for solving real problems!

Data Science Institute-Industry-Innovation Seminar: GE
2018-10-04 17:00 - 18:30
OPEN TO ALL

REGISTER HERE

Dr. Paul Ardis, Research Mission Leader at GE Global Research | “Going Further: Changing the Airline Industry Beyond the Aircraft”

Thursday, October 4, 2018
5:00PM – 6:30PM
Schapiro CEPSR, Davis Auditorium (412)

Abstract: Analytics are opening up new possibilities in the aviation sector as we think beyond the airplane during flight. Putting together GE’s expertise in AI for manufacturing and service with airline passenger analytics and intelligent supply chains, we are working towards a future where efficiency and agility is realized to maximize efficiency and minimize disruption.

Bio: Dr. Ardis has been leading AI research in the aviation sector at GE Global Research since 2013, having previously served as a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology and as a research contractor to the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Info Session: Columbia PowerBridgeNY
2018-10-04 12:00 - 13:00
OPEN TO: Columbia-employed researchers, post-doctoral candidates, and Ph.D. candidates
RSVP HERE
October 4th, 12pm, Mudd (Room TBD)
PowerBridgeNY is a proof-of-concept center (of which Columbia University is a partner) that provides up to $150K to validate and commercialize emerging clean energy innovations. All Columbia-employed researchers, post-doctoral candidates, and Ph.D. candidates are eligible to serve as Principal Investigators and may apply for this funding opportunity.
The pre-proposal opens October 1st and is due November 1st. Join us at this info session to learn more about the program! Lunch will be provided.

Information Session: Lab-to-Market Accelerators | Life Sciences
2018-10-04 12:00 - 13:00
Join the information session at MORNINGSIDE, MUDD 343, 12pm-1pm.
BRINGING YOUR IDEAS TO LIFE…
Moving cutting-edge university research out of the lab to benefit society
Accelerator programs aim to catalyze innovation via support to interdisciplinary engineer/scientist/clinician teams, with the goal of increasing the potential for private investment towards continued product development, clinical testing, and, ultimately, improved patient care and healthcare outcomes.
Selected teams work closely with business, legal and regulatory experts to define commercially-relevant hypotheses for research towards technical and business proof-of-concepts.

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
Project funding, education and support for interdisciplinary teams working to advance innovative ideas with the potential to positively impact health outcomes.
THERAPEUTICS / DRUG DEVELOPMENT
Accelerating Cancer Therapeutics | ACT
Translational Therapeutics Resource | TRx
MEDICAL TECHNOLOGIES / DEVICES
Biomedical Technology Accelerator | BiomedX (formerly Columbia-Coulter)

Urban Works Challenge: India (Kickoff)
2018-10-02

APPLICATION DEADLINE, 8 AM: Design Your Venture
2018-10-01 08:00
APPLY HERE
Are you an entrepreneurial Columbia student?
Is there a specific challenge or a problem you are passionate about solving?
Do you want to be part of an incredible cohort of change-makers?
Do you want to develop practical approaches that will lead to sustainable solutions?
The Design Your Venture program will work with a limited number of highly motivated teams to tackle an issue they’re passionate about using design to solve. Over the course of the semester, teams will dive into each phase of the design process together and receive one-on-one coaching from the Design Team.
Throughout the program you will:
* Interview and research real users and stakeholders in the community you are designing for.
* Design an innovative solution for your challenge.
* Have a coherent market, value proposition, and workable prototype by the end of the program.
This program is a deep dive into creating a venture based on user-feedback and testing so it will be particularly useful for students applying for any of the entrepreneurship fund challenges in their respective schools. You will be joining an impressive community: a number of teams who have been through this program have gone on to receive investment, win the Columbia Venture Competition, and earned seats in the Columbia Startup Lab.
APPLY HERE
Important Dates & Times:
Applications Open: August 29th, 8am
Applications Close: October 1st, 8am
Accepted Applicant Teams Notified: October 5th by 5pm

Design You Venture Launch and Happy Hour: October 11, 4:10pm-5:50pm
Design Your Venture will start on Thursday, October 11th, from 4:10 pm to 5:50pm followed by five consecutive weekly sessions on Thursday afternoons, ending on November 15th, the week before Thanksgiving Spring Break. If you are applying as a team you only need to fill out one application.

APPLICATIONS OPEN: PowerBridgeNY
2018-10-01
OPEN TO: Columbia-employed researchers, post-doctoral candidates, and Ph.D. candidates
APPLY HERE
Applications are now open for the sixth cycle of PowerBridgeNY!
PowerBridgeNY is a proof-of-concept center (of which Columbia University is a partner) that provides up to $150K to validate and commercialize emerging clean energy innovations. All Columbia-employed researchers, post-doctoral candidates, and Ph.D. candidates are eligible to serve as Principal Investigators and may apply for this funding opportunity.
The pre-proposal opens October 1st and is due November 1st.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA)
2018-10-01
OPEN TO UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE STUDENTS – see full eligibility rules.
What is GSEA?
The Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA) is a global competition for students who own and operate a business while attending college or university. EO GSEA supports student entrepreneurs who require much needed mentorship, recognition and connections to take their businesses to the next level of success. The 2018-19 Regional NYC Competition offers NYC-based students with a budding business the opportunity to compete with other student-entrepreneurs for a chance to appear in the National GSEA Competition, and ultimately the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards in Asia. Please view the NY competition website here.

Application Deadline
October 1, 2018
Applications are open here

Competition Date
November 2018

Empire State Opioid Epidemic Innovation Challenge (Solution Sprint)
2018-09-29 - 2018-09-30
Following Columbia’s opioid design challenge last fall, Columbia Engineering and Mailman School of Public Health are now working with the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech) to host a follow-up challenge. Also in partnership with the State of New York, the Office of the Staten Island Borough President, and Northwell Health, the event will be in Davis Auditorium (530 W. 120th Street) September 28-30, 2018 and will feature prominent State and City officials as keynote speakers.
The Empire State Opioid Epidemic Innovation Challenge is comprised of two events

Challenge Summit, Friday Sept. 28, will convene clinicians, government representatives, public health experts and affected community members to facilitate a discussion of challenges and provide critical insight into the opioid epidemic. Importantly, this day serves as the unmet needs identification in the opioid crisis to inform solutions designed and built over the weekend.
Solution Sprint, Saturday and Sunday Sept. 29-30, will serve as a hackathon-style open-innovation platform for a diverse community to co-create solutions over a 48-hour period.

Through cross-disciplinary collaboration, mentorship and award incentives, teams can accelerate ideas into breakthrough innovations with the potential to change the trajectory of local and national opioid crisis.
We encourage Columbia students and faculty to participate. A flyer is attached and participants can register here: http://camtechmgh.org/forms/register/NYCopioids

Data Science Institute | Annual Town Hall | 2018
2018-09-28 10:00 - 11:30
OPEN TO ALL

REGISTER HERE

Friday, September 28, 2018
10:00AM – 11:30AM
** NOTE NEW LOCATION: Maison Francaise | East Gallery | Buelle Hall**

The Data Science Institute of Columbia University’s mission is to advance the state-of-the-art in data science; to transform all fields, professions, and sectors through the application of data science; and to ensure the responsible use of data for the benefit of society.

The Institute invites the Columbia Community to join us at our annual Town Hall to hear about recent highlights and to discover existing and emerging opportunities for engagement with the Institute.

Empire State Opioid Epidemic Innovation Challenge (Summit)
2018-09-28
Following Columbia’s opioid design challenge last fall, Columbia Engineering and Mailman School of Public Health are now working with the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech) to host a follow-up challenge. Also in partnership with the State of New York, the Office of the Staten Island Borough President, and Northwell Health, the event will be in Davis Auditorium (530 W. 120th Street) September 28-30, 2018 and will feature prominent State and City officials as keynote speakers.
The Empire State Opioid Epidemic Innovation Challenge is comprised of two events

Challenge Summit, Friday Sept. 28, will convene clinicians, government representatives, public health experts and affected community members to facilitate a discussion of challenges and provide critical insight into the opioid epidemic. Importantly, this day serves as the unmet needs identification in the opioid crisis to inform solutions designed and built over the weekend.
Solution Sprint, Saturday and Sunday Sept. 29-30, will serve as a hackathon-style open-innovation platform for a diverse community to co-create solutions over a 48-hour period.

Through cross-disciplinary collaboration, mentorship and award incentives, teams can accelerate ideas into breakthrough innovations with the potential to change the trajectory of local and national opioid crisis.
Participants can register here: http://camtechmgh.org/forms/register/NYCopioids

Third Thursday (this time on a fourth Thursday...): Welcome Back Entrepreneurs!!
2018-09-27 17:30 - 19:30
OPEN TO ALL COLUMBIANS
RSVP HERE
Third Thursday is a recurring open forum and networking info session for the Columbia University entrepreneurship community. It provides students, faculty, staff, and alumni the opportunity to hear ideas from across campus, form teams, and explore career options. You’ll hear from Columbia alumni and other experts on their experiences working in the field, how they’ve applied their Columbia experience in their careers, and more.
Join us! Food will be served!
Have an announcement or idea to pitch to the group? Contact Ivy Schultz (is2350@columbia.edu) in advance and come prepared to pitch it!

Cross-device User Clustering at Adobe
2018-09-26 17:00 - 18:30
OPEN TO ALL

REGISTER HERE

Wednesday, September 26, 2018
5:00PM – 6:30PM
Schapiro CEPSR, Davis Auditorium (412)

ABSTRACT: As people now engage with digital properties using a myriad of devices such as laptops, smart phones, tablets, connected TVs and gaming consoles, the traditional cookie-based or device-level views of online user interaction are too narrow. Even when using a single device, a person may be assigned multiple IDs due to cookie churn or the use of different browsers. Marketers are looking through a fragmented lens and are spending their marketing dollars without understanding more than a fractional part of consumer interactions.

This talk will give an overview of how Adobe is tackling this problem using graph processing techniques, going over our journey from the initial research ideas to a fully productized product that works at scale running in the cloud while respecting user privacy. Focus will be on our open-source technology stack, including Apache Spark, GraphX, OpenTSDB, … along with a description of our algorithms and the challenges we went through to run them at very large scale on Amazon Web Services.

Bio: Charles is a data engineer/scientist at Adobe, where he has been involved on many projects revolving around big data, infrastructure and data science. Passionate about data, Charles is constantly on the lookout for the newest technologies and applications related to data science at scale. After graduating with a Master’s degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from EPITA, France, in 2010, Charles has since focused his career on the online advertising industry, working at an ad network, a Demand-Side Platform, and currently Adobe’s Data Management Platform.

Showcase: NextGen Cleantech
2018-09-24 17:30 - 21:00
OPEN TO ALL
RSVP HERE
Sept. 24th, 5:30-9pm, New York Academy of Sciences, New York, NY.
Sponsored this year by Shell, NextGen Cleantech is a night of cutting edge innovation that will feature pitches & showcasing from the awardees of PowerBridgeNY and NEXUS-NY as well as a keynote address from William McDonough, a global leader in sustainable design and author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things and a talk from former cleantech entrepreneur and Breakthrough Energy investor, Kyle Teamey.
Stop by to learn about innovations that could help solve some of the most important issues affecting our climate, water, energy, waste, and transportation.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: SIPA Dean's Public Policy Challenge Grant
2018-09-24
OPEN TO: all teams with at least one SIPA student in a substantive role.
APPLY HERE
SIPA seeks proposals from Columbia University students for innovative projects that use digital technology and/or data analytics to solve global policy problems. For full competition details, please refer to the SIPA Dean’s Public Policy Challenge Grant website.
