From Concept to Impact: Beginning with the End in Mind Highlights of the 2015 Cornell Hospitality Entrepreneurship Roundtable

Among the many topics that directly affect entrepreneurs’ success are these five: franchising, funding, technology, opportunity recognition, and legal arrangements. The inaugural roundtable convened by The Leland C. and Mary M. Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University addressed these five topics, with a goal of supporting hospitality entrepreneurs from concept to impact. The institute provides a springboard for hospitality entrepreneurs, particularly students at the School of Hotel Administration

Utility and Disruption: Technology for the Entrepreneurs in Hospitality: Highlights from the 2015 Technology Entrepreneurship Roundtable

The inaugural Technology Entrepreneurship Roundtable brought thirty leading tech professionals and entrepreneurs to the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration during the spring 2015 semester. Participants examined the growth of the cloud and the resulting opportunities for entrepreneurs to break into established markets, notably by using mobile devices in remote and shared office spaces, streamlining documents and systems to prevent redundancy, and decreasing operating and switching costs while minimizing the need for established infrastructure. Given the economic flexibility afforded by renting assets, rather than owning them, consumers and entrepreneurs have driven the expansion of the so-called sharing economy. The support of venture capital has been critical for such entrepreneurial technology in the hospitality and travel industry. Technology is also key to the growing customer desire to have a personalized travel experience, which can become a challenge to established brands. Many of these tech-supported enterprises are disruptors that respond to consumers’ desire for options as they travel. To counter the disruptions and re-emphasize their standing, brands need to use market analytics when engaging with customers and to plan for using predictive analytics

Steady-state VEP-based brain-computer interface control in an immersive 3D gaming environment

This paper presents an application of an effective EEG-based Brain Computer Interface design as the control mechanism for an immersive 3-D game. The BCI uses the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) generated in response to phase-reversing checkerboard patterns. Real-time game control and signal processing is facilitated by a combined graphics/DSP/network communications framework. Three methods of feature extraction are compared in a series of offline classification tests. It is found that autoregressive modelling of the EEG trials performs better than more intuitive power spectrum estimation, giving best accuracy of 89%. Two power spectrum estimation methods are also compared during realtime game play. Despite the relatively uncontrolled environment in which the game was played, the performance of the BCI control was robust and relatively consistent across all subjects with 41 of 48 games successfully completed. Performance while playing the game is found to be an improvement on performance in the offline tests, the cause of which is attributed to the goal-driven nature of the game. The potential impact of such an immersive gaming system on the rehabilitation of neurological disorders such as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder is discussed