hackNY aims to federate the next generation of hackers for the New York innovation community.
Co-organized by faculty from NYU and Columbia, and with a board of advisors which includes educators, technologists, and entrepreneurs, hackNY has since February 2010 organized the hackNY Fellows program and hackNY student ‘hackathons’ during the school year in order to create and empower a community of student-technologists.
Organizers
Evan Korth is a Clinical Associate Professor of Computer Science at NYU where he is faculty advisor to their chapter of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and Tech@NYU as well as coach of the ICPC Programming Team. In addition to teaching some foundational CS courses he teaches Information Technology Projects, a course in which students solve real-world problems with NYC companies including some well known start-ups, and in 2006 he revived the long defunct Computers in Society course. Evan was recently elected by the community to the Board of the New York Tech Meetup, is a TechStars mentor, VP of the Internet Society of NY and a member of the investment committee for the NYU Innovation Venture Fund. Evan has been an active member of NYC’s startup community since 1999, helping to build two companies (Afternic.com and NowPublic.com) and bring them to successful exits.
Chris Wiggins is an associate professor at Columbia University and faculty representative both for Columbia’s chapter of SIAM (the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) and for Columbia’s ADI (Application Development Initiative). For several years he has coorganized a regular ‘Startup-Math Collaborative’ meetup, in which quantitative NYC startups present mathematical and computational real-world challenges to CU students, to introduce them to under-advertised career opportunities in NYC as well as to the excitement of solving real-world challenges.
Advisors
Chad Dickerson is CTO at Etsy, the world’s most vibrant handmade marketplace, based in Brooklyn, NY. As of January 2011, Etsy has over 6.9 million registered members and over 400,000 active sellers with 7.7 million listings in the marketplace. Previously, Chad was at Yahoo!, where he led the Advanced Products, Brickhouse, and Yahoo! Developer Network groups. Chad started the Hack Day program at Yahoo, which was adopted by companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500. Before that, Chad was CTO at InfoWorld (IDG), and Salon.com.
Hilary Mason is member of NYC Resistor and the lead scientist at bit.ly (a NYC startup).
Christopher Poole, known online as “moot”, is the founder of 4chan. Founded in 2003, 4chan is known for generating some of the Web’s most prolific memes. Christopher is currently working on a venture backed startup called Canvas and is an advisor to Lerer Ventures, a seed stage venture capital fund. He was a featured speaker at TED 2010 and will be keynoting SXSW Interactive 2011.
Victoria Stodden is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Columbia University, and completed her Ph.D. in statistics in 2006 at Stanford University and her Master of Legal Students in 2007 at Stanford Law School. Her current research focuses on how pervasive and large-scale computation is changing our practice of the scientific method: especially regarding reproducibility of computational results and the role of legal framing for scientific advancement. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at both Harvard and Yale Law Schools and MIT’s Sloan School of Business, won the Kaltura Writing Competition in 2008, and co-chaired a working group on the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure’s Task Force on Grand Challenge Communities (released Dec 2010). She is also a Science Commons fellow, and a nominated member of the Sigma Xi scientific research society. Her webpage is www.stodden.net and she occasionally blogs at blog.stodden.net.
Nate Westheimer is a New York-based entrepreneur and early-stage investor. Formerly, Nate was the Co-Founder and EVP of Product & Technology at AnyClip.com, a company indexing every moment from every film. Prior to AnyClip, Nate was the Entrepreneur at Rose Tech Ventures, Founder of BricaBox.com, and the Technology Strategist for National Public Media. Nate blogs at innonate.com and guest writes for Silicon Alley Insider, among other outlets. Currently, Nate also serves as the Executive Director the NY Tech Meetup, a 15,000 member organization of technologists in the New York City area.
General Manager
Manya Ellenberg is hackNY’s general manager. She’s a Barnard College alumna and Athena Leadership Scholar. She served as the Athena Leadership Lab Coordinator at the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College and interned and researched for the President of Echoing Green. Manya has also volunteered with Columbia’s Peer Health Exchange. Before starting her undergraduate degree, she spent a year in Tel Aviv. Manya’s a native New Yorker with a great passion for NYC’s sights, sounds, food, and energy.
Events Manager
Matylda Czarnecka is hackNY’s events manager and founder of Love Your Layover. She is a Syracuse University and NYU alumna and Jack Kent Cooke Foundation scholar with a background in innovation in digital journalism. Matylda has written for publications including TechCrunch and PBS MediaShift, curated Tech@NYU‘s StartupDigest, and helped launch projects for the Economist, New York Times, and channel Thirteen. Matylda has also volunteered with ACM SIGGRAPH and chaired the Student Volunteers program.
Enablers
Special thanks to Alexandra Qin for going above and beyond.
Supporters
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Internet Society, New York
Supporters of hackNY include:
AOL Ventures; Andreessen Horowitz; DFJ Gotham; ff Venture Capital;
First Round Capital; Firstmark Capital; Google Ventures; Gunderson
Dettmer; IA Ventures; Lerer Ventures; Lowenstein Sandler; Square 1
Bank; Techstars NYC; and Union Square Ventures; as well as Columbia
Technology Ventures (Columbia University); ISOC-NY; Marks Paneth &
Shron; NYCEDC; NYCIF; NYC Tech Connect; the NYU Department of Computer
Science; and Wilson Sonsini.
Founders
hackNY was founded on February 23, 2010 by Evan, Chris, and Hilary, after much discussion, planning, and milkshakes.
LEGAL:
hackNY is a registered 501c3;
EIN: 27-3758609.
Address:
PO BOX 176
NEW YORK NY 10276-0176
