Summer 2016 – Page 2 – Seidenberg School News

“Smart and connected communities” come together at STEM Collaboratory oyster event

The STEM Collaboratory NYC held a fantastic event on June 8th involving dinner, panel discussions, and networking. The event, held at Pace University’s Schimmel Theater, focused on law and technology’s place in restoration, in particular the NY harbor restoration. The Seidenberg School is close to the Billion Oyster Project, which aims to restore the NY harbor back to its previous oyster-inhabited glory, and Billion Oyster Project co-founder, Murray Fisher, spoke on one of the panels.

After enjoying a buffet-style dinner of sandwiches, pastries, and – of course – oysters, attendees moved into the auditorium and were welcomed by Pace Provost, Uday Sukhatme, who made the opening remarks before passing the mic to Dr. Jonathan Hill, the Interim Dean of Seidenberg.

“This is a powerhouse of people who have innovative ideas about how to teach STEM in schools,” Dr. Hill said, before the first panel began.

The Environmental Law and Policy panel included Murray Fisher, Steve Kass, Sean Dixon, and Andrea Leshak, and was moderated by John Cronin. The panel discussed environmental restoration, with Sean Dixon – who teaches Oceans and Coastal Law here at Pace – pointing out that “the biggest thing with oysters in NYC is how big an opportunity they are.” The restoration of the harbor to a point where oysters can once again populate the water means cleaner water for other things.

The second panel invited top young entrepreneurs from the NY tech scene to present and discuss their projects. Among participants were Olga Bogomolova and Julie Gauthier, two Seidenberg students (as well as staff/professors!) who created coding app Codapillar together. Other panelists included the talented Delali Dzirasa and Carson Chodos, with the DOE’s Director of Technology and Engineering (Teaching and Learning Division), Nancy Woods, moderating.

Finally, Ben Bostick, Ray Sombrotto and Bob Newton took to the stage to discuss “Restoration Science – A Scientific Perspective.” They discussed the restoration of the NY harbor in a very optimistic light, with Ray explaining that “the focus on keystone species like oysters helps with restoration.”

“If you’re going to talk about restoration, you may as well shoot high,” he said.

The evening concluded with a raffle, where lucky several attendees won gift cards.

Thanks go out to Lauren Birney, Jonathan Hill, Brian Evans, Pace University and the NSF for making such a wonderful evening possible!

Students build mobile apps to raise awareness of the Zika virus

The Zika virus has been making headlines recently as outbreaks have occurred in various countries around the globe, with the World Health Organization ultimately declaring the virus a global public health emergency.

As something that has been on a lot of people’s minds, the Zika virus became the subject of several mobile apps developed by students at the Seidenberg School. Several of the students are visiting students from Brazil, who decided to build the apps to raise awareness given the virus’ presence in their home country.

Zika Defender was built by Nida Butt, Marcus Ferreira, Russell Gee and Pedro Borges Pio in CS 389 Software Engineering, which is taught by Dr. Christelle Scharff. The app is a game in which players eliminate mosquitoes before they can reach their targets. While playing, users learn more about the virus: “As more people use our app, the more attention will be given to the dire situation in Brazil, where many people are suffering from this illness,” the team’s website states.

Another team created ZikAlert, an informational app that offers insight into symptoms, prevention and transmission of the disease. The team is comprised of Frank Fico, Luiz Fernando da Silva Sieslak and Hongyuan ‘Peter’ Li.

From the team page: “Brazil attracts an increasing amount of tourist traffic throughout the year; given the ongoing outbreak of the Zika virus, it is paramount to raise people’s awareness of the ailment (and preventative methods therein) to prevent it from becoming a bigger issue than it needs to be.”

The apps have been submitted to OpenIDEO, an open innovation platform that aims to solve global challenges for social good. The apps were featured on the site and in its newsletter.

Fantastic job to the hardworking students involved!

Recap: the 21st Annual Leadership and Service in Technology Awards

The 21st annual Leadership and Service in Technology (LST) Awards was a fantastic evening at Club 101, a gorgeous venue two blocks south of Grand Central terminal.

This year’s theme was “Celebrating Technology: Improving the Quality of Life” and honored our esteemed alumnus, Mike Capone, who graduated from Pace Seidenberg in 1993 and went on to have an incredible career in the healthcare tech industry. Mike spoke about his work as the COO of Medidata, a healthcare data analytics provider, where he oversees delivery of products and services, such as product management, software development, data science, professional services and marketing.

Prior to his role at Medidata, Mike spent 25 years working at ADP as the CIO and CVP of product development. In his address to the LST audience, Mike spoke about his wonderful experiences there and how he ultimately chose to move on to his dream job at Medidata.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Robert Darnell, the Founding Director and CEO of the New York Genome Center, with which the Seidenberg School recently formed a collaboratory relationship. Dr. Darnell gave a passionate address to the LST crowd that truly highlighted ways in which technology can change healthcare.

Our power speakers: Mike Capone, Robert Darnell, Andreea Cotoranu, Jonathan Hill and Briana Vecchione

Very recent Seidenberg alumnus, Briana Vecchione (BS Computer Science ’16), also took to the podium to talk about the impact of technology in her life at the event, which just happened to be after her first day working at Microsoft!

Before and after the main event, the evening was filled with food, drinks and networking as guests from all kinds of backgrounds and industries flocked to celebrate Mike’s achievements.

We are incredibly grateful to all who attended this celebration, particularly to Robert Darnell and Mike Capone for their excellent participation.

Seidenberg School’s second year of creating mobile apps with Ionic

The Seidenberg School’s CS 641 Mobile Web Development class just wrapped up its second year, with 54 graduate students and one undergraduate in the class this semester. Students created iOS and Android apps with the Ionic 2 framework, and created online portfolios of their work.

The class is taught by Adjunct Professor Haik Sahakian. “If you’re a web developer, Ionic turns you into a mobile app developer as well. You write apps in Javascript that run on iOS and Android from the same code base. And it’s a fun way to learn Angular 2.”

One of the apps from the class was selected for a showcase of graduate student work being put together by the department chair, Dr Christelle Scharff. Written by William Dickerson, it uses the D3 and Leaflet JavaScript libraries to display a travel map of New York City. A user selects a point on the map and how far he or she is willing to walk, and the app displays which parts of the city are reachable with a single subway ride.

“[My app] began as a webpage, which took me about 40 hours to develop into what it is now. If I started from scratch today, it would probably take me less time, but D3, Leaflet, and even JavaScript were new to me at the time. Transitioning the webpage to a mobile app using the Ionic 2 framework took very little time, just a matter of hours.

I liked how each lecture and assignment in the Mobile Web class built on the previous one, allowing us to put everything together into projects worth sharing. We started the first lecture with a blank html file in a text editor, and by week 15, we had covered enough libraries, tools, and web fundamentals to build quality mobile webpages and apps.”

William Dickerson

The class’s apps feel very similar to native apps. Prof. Sahakian said Ionic achieves this because “it comes with web-based UI components that look and behave just like native components, and it uses the open source Cordova library to connect with a mobile device’s hardware and features. An Ionic app is an enhanced web page embedded in a native app wrapper, rather than a native app itself, so it’s a little slower than native for complex features and animations, but it works well, and enables web developers to build apps quickly.”

CS 641 Mobile Web Development is offered every Spring semester. Dr Scharff’s collection of graduate student work will be displayed in the Seidenberg Mobile Lab at 163 William St in the fall.