Wharton to rebrand around a single word: knowledge

The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business is one of the top-ranked business schools in the country, but the school doesn’t seem inclined to rest on its Ivy League laurels.

The business school is launching a rebranding initiative intended to achieve a consistent message across all of its 20 research centers, as the Wall Street Journal reported. The focus will use the word ‘knowledge.’

Traditionally the school has been known for its finance programming, but now, as Wharton dean Thomas Robertson told the Wall Street Journal, the school wants to emphasize its other three focus areas — innovation, social impact and global presence.

The rebrand may do more to promote Wharton’s technology innovation and entrepreneurial success by attracting more top talent to the entrepreneurial programming like the Wharton Venture Initiation Program.

ExCAPE: Penn researchers will lead 5 yr, $10M project to program with talking computers

The $10 million National Science Foundation-funded ExCAPE program led by Penn will probably not result in a system that looks like this.

For those who don’t know how to code, programming languages can seem like intractable gibberish. For those who do, the programming required to solve a problem can be so complex that they feel the same way.

Researchers at Penn have just received a five-year, $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation to help simplify the process of talking to computers to minimize programming errors. The project, which will be completed in partnership with a host of other schools, is called Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering — ExCAPE, for short, according to the press release.

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AT&T Aspire program offers career opportunities for Girl Scouts from Hunting Park, Germantown

Girl Scouts from Esperanza Academy took notes on different careers presented by the AT&T Aspire program..

Global nonprofit organization Junior Achievement works as a partner with AT&T’s $250 million Aspire initiative, which has already given $800,000 locally.

Together, the groups brought 32 Girl Scouts from Nueva Esperanza Academy in Hunting Park and Germantown High Schools last week to AT&T regional offices in King of Prussia to hear about career opportunities in technology and business.

“We are so excited to be celebrating the 100,000 student mark with Junior Achievement and AT&T nationally that we’ve reached over a three-year program,” said Laura Yohe, program director of Junior Achievement in Delaware Valley.

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Dean Harris: award winning local technologist teaching computer science to Philly high schoolers

Dean Harris

Every Saturday morning since January, a group of about 17 Philadelphia teenagers have been trooping over to a Temple University computer lab to learn about computer science.

The students, mostly from area charter and magnet schools, are largely college-bound and predictably excited to learn, say those involved. So it’s surprising that their teacher, Dean Harris, sees himself as unlikely role model, he told Technically Philly, but his track record as an innovative digital electronics technologist suggests otherwise.

So does the apparent respect of the teens, who are giving up sleep and Saturday morning cartoons to be in class with him and his co-teachers, leading Java Presenter and DRUPAL expert Tariq Hook, mechanical engineer L Dollio Durant and Harris’s son, Askia Harris.

To explain why Harris still sounds a little surprised when he says that he teaches Computer Science 101, despite the fact that he’s taught eight classes so far, begins when Harris was a teenager in Philadelphia in the 1970s, about the same age as some of his students.

His path — from lost kid to student to heavy technologist to teacher — is instructive in the city’s battle for digital access illustrated by STEM education.

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PhilaSoup, Springboard Collaborative take home prizes at Philly SEED education pitch event

Springboard Collaborative won in the Established category during the PhillySEED pitch event

Considering the School District of Philadelphia’s ongoing $700 million budget crisis, education news of late in Philadelphia has had a tendency to be grim.

But that wasn’t the tenor Wednesday night, when 12 ambitious, local education ventures competed for prize packs of entrepreneurial resources.

PhilaSoup, an emerging, public dinner party discussion group dedicated to investing its proceeds to startup education ventures received a $5,000 check to strengthen its efforts. And Springboard Collaborative, which engages students through the summer months to help retain knowledge received a suite of pro-bono services to help it grow.

Those winners presented polished pitches to hundreds of young Philadelphians gathered at WHYY headquarters for Philly SEED (Supporting Entrepreneurship in Education) to see emerging or established education startups that are hoping to, or already are, impacting city students.

The dense, interested crowd was emblematic of the new role some Philadelphia citizens are playing in order to help shape education reform: taking action with or without the permission of the School District of Philadelphia.

The event was put together by the new PhillyCORE Leaders (Coalition of Rising Education Leaders) group, whose aim it is to promote the dialogue coming from younger members of Philadelphia. The group hopes to engage the education community, encourage education innovation in Philadelphia and reform schools. [Full Disclosure: Technically Philly was an in-kind sponsor of the event.]

The idea started in GChat, primarily, said organizer Claire Robertson-Kraft in her opening remarks, before it moved to coffee shops and landed at WHYY, with an opening from Newsworks head Chris Satullo and from Councilman Bill Green.

“We hear from education colleagues in other cities, Philadelphia is a really hard place to change. We get that pat on the back. But that’s not what we see from this community,” she said, referring to the active, engaged participants.

After the jump, Technically Philly dishes out its own awards to participants.

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AT&T Aspire: $250 million national job readiness program already given $800k locally

In its new $250 million initiative program called AT&T Aspire, the company aims to help young and driven students to graduate from high school with the technological tools and skills they need to advance into a successful career.

AT&T unveiled their newest goals for the program recently, promising a five-year financial commitment to the program which urges proactive and successful schools to apply.

Apply here.

The program has helped Philadelphia-based organizations over the last year to succeed. With almost $800,000 going to local drop-out initiatives, programs such as Philadelphia’s Children First Fund and Let’s Get Ready at Penn have been positively involved with Aspire.

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Councilman David Oh: “We have to talk about growing the pie more than regulating it”

Photo courtesy of Oh's Facebook page

Since January, David Oh has been a hard man to get in touch with.

That’s when he was sworn in as a new Councilman-At-Large along with 5 other new members of Philadelphia City Council, an elected rookie class that meant the departure of six veteran members of the Council’s seventeen seats.

Oh says that life as an attorney at Zarwin Baum DeVito Kaplan Schaer Toddy, P.C. — where he has worked since 2008 when he merged his private practice with the firm — has changed. Though he says he’s been waking at 4:30 in the morning and working as late as 11:00 p.m., he hasn’t been able to practice much law in the courtroom since the election.

Instead, he’s been focused on transitioning to his new role as Councilman.

Oh grew up in Southwest Philadelphia, where he still lives today with his wife and three young children. He says his political aspirations were driven in part from watching his father Reverend Ki Hang Oh found the city’s first Korean-American church in 1953.

“Growing up and living in a poor section of Philadelphia, I was exposed to the problems and issues that people face and ultimately saw many occasions where people who didn’t have much opportunity became successful,” he says. “There was always the question: ‘couldn’t we do something a little better’?

Shortly after starting his new post, Oh helped found and now chairs the new Committee on Global Opportunities and the Creative/Innovative Economy, dedicated to exploring ways to improve Philadelphia’s economy through the those sectors. He also sits on the Committee of Technology and Information Services.

After the jump, Oh talks business taxes, global economy and growth and honest government.

Oh announces his Philadelphia City Council campaign in January 2011.


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SLATE high school learning management tool soft launches, Jarvus Innovations pursues vision of education reform

Updated: Feb. 27, 2012 @ 12:42pm with additional perspective from co-founders.

John Fazio got kicked out of high school.

Then he dropped out of Drexel. He says his mentors recommended he do it.

So it might seem ironic that the product that Fazio’s web development shop Jarvus aims to make its biggest splash yet is its long-planned SLATE, an open source high school management tool that is already in use at two area high schools, with plans to be introduced at ten more this summer.

Fazio says there’s nothing ironic about it.

Fazio and Jarvus cofounder Chris Alfano, a fellow Drexel dropout, are passionate about reforming education. Fazio hopes SLATE will revolutionize the high school experience he hated. In the meantime, they’ve taken some of that responsibility into their own hands, as evidenced by the rotation of high school students they train to be programmers.

“I was the kid who got really good [test scores] and failed classes because I was not interested in the linear progression of knowledge,” Fazio said. “Chris was the same way.”

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Meet the Roberto Clemente Middle School robotics club in Hunting Park

Two Roberto Clemente Students worked carefully on their Lego windmill. Photo by Erica DePascale.

At Roberto Clemente Middle School in Hunting Park, 4 p.m. may be after school, but for the student members of the robotics club, it is the beginning of learning new and exciting technology.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, 5th through 8th graders meet to discuss and create different robotics projects. The club, led by teacher Evelyn Cruz, allows students to play hands on with robotics kits and structures to produce everything from autonomous path-finding robots to remote controlled underwater explorers.

“It opens a lot of doors for them in terms of science and technology,” Cruz said. “It pushes them to be more open to doing the math and doing the science.”

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Seven Hubo humanoid robots take Drexel University stage, largest group ever in U.S., say organizers [VIDEO]

Maybe it will make me breakfast?

That was one young audience member’s reaction to seeing seven Hubo robots dance on stage at Drexel University on Monday. The presentation — put on by Drexel’s Department of Engineering in partnership with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) Hubo Lab to kick of National Engineers Week — is not just a first for Philadephia, it’s the first time so many humanoid robots have taken the stage at once in the United States, say organizers.

The event was led by the celebrated Dr. Youngmoo Kim, associate professor and assistant dean of media technologies in the College of Engineering and director of the Music and Entertainment Technology  Lab.

While the “Hubo family,” as Kim called them during the exhibition, is not quite ready to make anyone breakfast, the Drexel graduate-level robotics engineers who work with the Korean technology demonstrated to a crowd of K-12 and Drexel students that the four foot, three inch (1.3 meter) tall robots could shake hands, withstand a shove from a four-year-old, perform tai chi and dance to a beat.

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