Tech:NYC Digest: August 4

August 04, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Friday, August 4, 2023

We’re back with another summer Friday edition of the Tech:NYC Digest, featuring our Friday Five highlights in New York tech this week.

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These 'trash bots' have been helping keep Brooklyn's Albee Square clean (Gothamist)

A pair of trash cans on remote-controlled wheels have been roaming Downtown Brooklyn this past two weeks. The "trash bots" are part of a Cornell Tech study to better understand how humans interact with robots in public space — while also helping keep those spaces clean!

As spend management space heats up, Brex and Rho turn to AI startups to help power new products (TechCrunch)

AI is exploding as its own industry, of course, but just as interesting are the ways it’s transforming every other industry. At the top of that list is finance. For example: Rho, the NYC-based corporate spend and cash management startup (and Tech:NYC member!), has launched AI-powered invoice and bill processing. Through a partnership with OpenAI, Rho's clients can authorize invoices to be automatically digitized and integrated into company systems, saving finance teams a lot of time and effort.

NYC expands city broadband to additional public housing sites (StateScoop)

The city’s Big Apple Connect program — which covers the costs of a high-speed internet plan and cable television for New Yorkers living in public housing — expanded this week to 17 additional public housing developments in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, making the service available to more than 330,000 total New Yorkers.

Researchers’ app could help people with visual impairments navigate the NYC subway (Engadget)

An app from researchers at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and Grossman School of Medicine uses a smartphone camera to recognize relevant signs along a transit route, helping guide people with vision impairments to their destinations. A study that used the app on three NYC stations — Jay Street-Metrotech, Dekalb Avenue, and Canal Street — had a 97% success rate in identifying the relevant signs needed to reach a mock destination.

20 years ago, SC reef system added NYC subway cars. Today, sea life ‘passengers’ thrive (Charleston Post and Courier)

NYC infrastructure goes South: Roughly 200 New York subway cars were submerged off the coast of South Carolina about 20 years ago to provide a habitat for marine life (part of a yearslong initiative that sunk about 2,500 decommissioned subway cars along the east coast). It worked — check out this underwater video of a busy commute on the “Sea Train.”

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