The National Science Foundation announced Sept. 13 that it has awarded $15 million over five years to establish and implement the Interior Northeast Region I-Corps Hub, known as IN I-Corps. The region, which stretches from New Hampshire to West Virginia, includes portions of the United States that are largely rural, economically underserved and working to restore economic vitality. IN I-Corps aims to expand the nation’s geography of innovation by creating a cohesive innovation ecosystem that delivers inclusive models of education and workforce training designed for and by innovators in rural regions and small cities.

“To be a part of this cohort of premier research institutions, whose dedication to innovation is so outstanding, is truly exciting,” says Per Stromhaug, associate vice president for innovation and economic development at Binghamton University. “The ecosystem that the Interior Northeast I-Corps Hub will support and expand is sure to create lasting effects for the entrepreneurs we will assist, as well as our region.”

Founded by the National Science Foundation in 2011, I-Corps programming nationwide empowers researchers to combine their technical and scientific knowledge with an entrepreneurial mindset to develop new technologies and startups that benefit society. The I-Corps curriculum addresses the knowledge gap between the skills needed to develop an innovative technology in a lab and the skills needed to bring that technology to market. With a core tenet of customer discovery, participants in I-Corps courses work to connect with potential customers and ensure the solutions they’re developing fill an existing market need.

Binghamton University will be joined by hub partner institutions Dartmouth College, Rochester Institute of Technology, SUNY Buffalo, Syracuse University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Rochester, University of Vermont, West Virginia University and Hub lead Cornell University. Each institution will be hosting regional I-Corps courses and contributing to programming and curriculum strategy.

The IN I-Corps Hub joins nine other I-Corps Hubs within the National Innovation Network, expanding the geographical reach of the network and promoting economic growth and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) talent development within rural communities and the small cities on their boundaries. The hub will offer regional courses designed to support geographically dispersed participants in learning the I-Corps method of customer discovery and applying it to real-world opportunities while remaining connected to their home institutions and communities.

Binghamton University has been an active member of the National Innovation Network (NIN), with its Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships heading up the Innovation Binghamton I-Corps Site for over five years.

“I-Corps has been tremendously valuable to our research community,” says Olga Petrova, assistant director of Binghamton University’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships, site director and I-Corps instructor. “It is incredibly rewarding to watch our professors and students take their real-world learnings from the I-Corps training back to their labs and research programs, leading to increased grant funding, startup activity and development of technologies with amazing societal benefits.”

A mission-critical element of the IN I-Corps Hub’s approach to entrepreneurship is the creation and administration of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives. STEM researchers in underrepresented groups face heightened barriers to success, and creating equitable access to resources and talent development is crucial to ensuring the most innovative deep-tech developments are being discovered and amplified. Hub leadership and partners are working to create opportunities to support the development of STEM research talent who are women, veterans, people of color and individuals with disabilities. These initiatives will include collaborations with organizations like the National GEM Consortium’s Inclusion in Innovation Initiative (i4) and Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

The IN I-Corps Hub will officially launch Jan. 1, 2023. Details are forthcoming for STEM researchers interested in learning about opportunities to participate in regional I-Corps courses at a Hub institution.

Her research involves understanding how people with psychopathic personality traits obtain “successful outcomes” — such as achieving occupational success (i.e., promotions, awards) or getting away with “bad behavior” (i.e., being unethical or having criminal behaviors).

The I-Corps program provides a month-long intensive course where participants discover the commercial potential behind their research or innovation and what their ideal customer base might be. It is designed for faculty, students, postdocs, researchers and startups with a research project that has real-world applications, a prototype or an early-stage product or technology.

The regional program provides a $3,000 grant to conduct customer interviews and further any prototypes; the national program provides a $50,000 grant.

Welsh’s work is conducted under the guidance of Mark F. Lenzenweger, distinguished professor of psychology, in his laboratory of experimental psychopathology. Together they co-authored “Psychopathy, charisma, and success: A moderation modeling approach to successful psychopathy,” which was recently published in the Journal of Research in Personality.

“Some psychopathic individuals who have been quite successful have been described as charming or charismatic,” Welsh says. “We wanted to know if charisma serves as a protective or moderating factor that allows psychopathic individuals to be more successful. Our most recent project suggests that psychopathic individuals who are highly charismatic are able to get away with ‘bad behavior’ and avoid punishment more often than psychopathic individuals who are less charismatic.”

Before joining the I-Corps program, Welsh thought her research, if used in a screening tool, might attract the interest of law enforcement, human resources and other hiring departments. After holding 20 customer discovery interviews with people from various industries, she found that her first adopters would likely be talent acquisition and recruiting agencies or staff who screen candidates for senior- and executive-level positions for moderate-sized to large organizations.

Anyone involved in personality science, organizational behavioral/industrial psychology or personnel selection and business administration scholars will find Welsh’s research to be instructive and rich with insights, Lenzenweger says.

“I see Emma making notable contributions to our understanding of psychopathy that will influence how many of the leading workers in the area will conceive of this disorder,” he says. “She is an engaged and creative emerging psychological scientist who brings her own ideas to research challenges, and this emphasis on originality makes her a clear standout.”

Welsh, who did her undergraduate work at New York University, says she appreciates how Lenzenweger encourages his graduate students to generate original and creative ideas. “Working with Mark has been absolutely wonderful because he encourages you to pursue your passion,” she says. “He wants his students to build their own program of research.”

Welsh, who grew up in Alpharetta, Ga., is staying open-minded about where her career path may take her.

“My findings through the I-Corps program have shown me that my research has a lot of potential industry applications, so the job I might want may not exist yet. I may need to create it. There is a gap and I can fill it,” she says. “I love both my clinical work and my research, so I hope to be able to continue to do both and merge my interests.”

In addition to a plenary talk and keynote speech, the day will include panels organized by Binghamton faculty members participating in the Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence. Topics will include the local implications of hydraulic fracturing and revealing the three-dimensionality of film emulsion.

Kevin Maney, a Newsweek columnist who began his journalism career at the Press & Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, will deliver the keynote: “Anticipating the Future … Just Enough.” Maney notes that big trends such as artificial intelligence and ubiquitous data will shape life. Sometimes, however, it’s the little things that help us understand what’s coming. His talk will invite participants to think about what it might be like to try on a dress, apply for college, pay for a coffee and do a few other things in the not-so-far-future.

Plenary speaker Mathias Vuille, associate professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University of Albany, will speak about how climate warming will influence everything from healthcare to the design of our future cities.

The day will conclude with two panels on education, one featuring current undergraduates musing on what college may look like in 2065 and another featuring Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger; James Pitarresi, assistant provost and executive director of the Center for Learning and Teaching; and Jason Andrews, superintendent of the Windsor Central School District.

“At Binghamton, we’re proud of our corporate partnerships,” said Per Stromhaug, assistant vice president for innovation and economic development. “Events like Innovation Day give us an opportunity to make connections among our faculty researchers, students, alumni, colleagues in industry as well as engaged community members. This year’s theme is especially fun and challenging. Imagining life at the midpoint of this century is a good way to spark new ideas about innovation across many disciplines.”

Every two days, the world generates as much data as there was in existence until 10 years ago. And while this data has enormous potential, it sometimes feels like we’re drowning in it.

That was just one of the observations shared during the third-annual Innovation Day at Binghamton University. The April 24 event, which drew about 125 participants from industry and academia, focused on Big Data and how it relates to fields ranging from healthcare to finance. The program, organized by the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships in conjunction with Binghamton’s Center of Excellence, featured plenary lectures and panels as well as tours of the Innovative Technologies Complex and a research poster session.

Hao Wang, vice president of information services and chief information officer of the Research Foundation for SUNY, kicked off the day’s lectures by noting that — in some ways — Big Data is nothing new.

Wang, who used to teach public health, said Big Data can be traced back to London’s cholera epidemic in the 1850s. Dr. John Snow did visualization work by hand, plotting deaths over time on a map of London. He lacked today’s advanced instrumentation and computer modeling, but Snow was able to reveal the source of the cholera outbreak. “Don’t be afraid of Big Data,” Wang said. “… The application is profound. You don’t need microbiology to understand this. Big Data can show you the way.”

Today, Wang envisions Big Data being used to protect the financial system, to enable drug discovery and to improve public safety, among other applications.

Katharine Frase, vice president and chief technology officer, IBM Public Sector, spoke about extracting real value from Big Data. Even if it doesn’t feel like it, Big Data affects all of us every day, she said.

Frase discussed a recent IBM survey of CEOs that found a third make decisions based on untrustworthy data and that half lack information they need. At the same time, 60 percent said they have too much data. “This,” she said, “is in some ways the real Big Data problem.”

Big Data is often defined by the four Vs, she noted: volume, variety, velocity and veracity.

Although reporting — a major source of Big Data — is important, Frase noted that it’s vital to be “more right, more often.” Reporting can be like driving while looking in the rear view mirror, she said. It’s more interesting, not to mention safer, to look through windshield and see what’s coming.

While experts often discuss intangible benefits of Big Data, it has important implications in the physical world, Frase said. For instance, ConocoPhillips reported $1 billion in savings from accurately predicting ice floes, which resulted in better protection of its oil rigs.

She offered a few additional examples of businesses getting value from Big Data projects:

• Sprint saw a 90 percent increased transaction capacity.
• Qualcomm reported 60 times faster query performance.
• MoneyGram saw a 72 percent reduction in fraudulent claims.

Frase said Big Data will produce traditional return on investment, or ROI, in some cases. In other instances, the scenario is more complex. For instance, resolving a problem related to traffic may also alleviate pollution and reduce accidents.

She suggested that data scientists will have the “sexiest job of the 21st century.” These jobs, she said, will require people who have the domain expertise to ask useful questions as well as the math and computer science expertise to put Big Data to work.

“Technology is really good at finding answers,” Frase said, “but the humans ought to be the ones asking the questions.”

In the afternoon, Innovation Day featured a self-proclaimed Big Data naysayer: Scott L. Zeger, professor and vice provost at Johns Hopkins University. “Where there’s too much data, there can be more confusion than clarity,” he said at the outset of his talk on Big Data in health.

He presented a reworked version of a song called “Help the Poor” by B.B. King and Eric Clapton. With a little assistance from YouTube, Zeger soon had everyone in the Center of Excellence’s new symposium hall singing along:

Help the poor
Won’t you help poor me
Got Big Data blues, baby
Need your help desperately
Big data’s the rage but it’s hard to use well
Got to get onboard before that trend does quell
Help the poor
Oh baby, won’t you help poor me

Many countries are healthier than we are, Zeger said. Yet the United States spends a trillion dollars more per year on health than Norway, the country that spends the second-largest amount. That trillion dollars? That’s the Big Datum, the one that matters the most, he says.

Zeger outlined some problems of the American system, chief among them a healthcare system that too often “pays for doing” rather than paying for results. We do a lot more than is done elsewhere, especially for patients with chronic conditions, he said, even though it often doesn’t make people healthier.

“Big Data,” he said, “can help us cut into that trillion dollars.”

Paquette, a Binghamton senior, worked last summer with Walker Land, research professor of bioengineering, to analyze gene expression data and predict the recurrence of cancer using a machine learning algorithm called Kernel Partial Least Squared, or KPLS. Similar data mining and artificial intelligence techniques are used by companies such as Amazon and Google to predict searches and rank pages.

“The technology exists and is proven,” Paquette says. “Now it’s a question of: How do we take that and apply it to other fields?”

Apply it he has. Paquette received $5,000 for his application of KPLS research to an InnoCentive project. InnoCentive is a website where industry, businesses and government agencies can tap into a community of problem solvers, and pay a one-time award for rights to the crowd-sourced solution.

The Environmental Defense Fund and Iowa Soybean Growers posted a challenge requesting technology to predict crop yield using nitrogen sensors that would help manage fertilizer use and boost crop productivity. Paquette’s winning idea was to use blimps with on-board sensors that would fly over crops and take nitrogen readings, which would correlate with the vigor of the crop. The information collected would be fed to the farmer’s computer for analysis.

“The guy’s very creative; he can see things that a lot of other students can’t see,” Land says of Paquette. “He thinks about things in a way that most people don’t.”

Paquette plans to pursue a doctorate in machine learning and artificial intelligence. “It’s an exciting field to get into,” he says. “I want to be an expert in it so I can create these systems, maybe make a few bucks and help the world doing it.”

The InnoCentive project inspired Paquette to bring the Web resource to other engineering students. He and some friends started a group devoted to solving InnoCentive challenges. The club facilitates collaborations among students, faculty members and entrepreneurs. “I want to develop a support network for student innovation,” Paquette says. “The University has so many resources, and if you don’t take full advantage of them, what’re you doing? I want to utilize everything I can to my advantage to do something good here.”

Paquette’s summer research inspired a senior design project, too. He’s using the KPLS research to predict the likelihood of lung cancer recurring within five years and to determine whether chemotherapy is necessary.

“Right now, cancer patients are getting chemo when they don’t need it,” Paquette says. “My dad had chemotherapy and it’s terrible. It destroys your quality of life.”