Ex-Twitter Exec Tapped for New Tech Campus
Friday, June 1, 2012
By: Jennifer Frey

Former Twitter Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Greg Pass will become the Founding Entrepreneurial Officer of the CornellNYC Tech Campus, home of the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute (TCII).

The campus will be organized around three interdisciplinary hubs in fields relevant to the city’s key industries: Connective Media, Healthier Life, and Built Environment.

Mr. Pass’s mission is to build the entrepreneurship component of the campus so that the school’s academic programs directly impact the NYC tech eco-system in these fields, especially the startup scene.

Mr. Pass is a Cornell alum, who used technology he developed as a student to co-found ToFish!, a histogram-based image matching technology company. When ToFish! was acquired by AOL in 2000, he became AOL’s System Architect, and in 2006 he co-founded the search engine start-up Summize. After Twitter bought Summize in 2008, Mr. Pass served as Twitter’s VP of Engineering and then as CTO. Mr. Pass will soon move from Silicon Valley to New York City.

“Greg is a perfect fit,” says TCII Founding Director, Technion Professor Craig Gotsman. “He’s a serial entrepreneur who knows what makes the high-tech industry tick and also appreciates the challenges of fostering entrepreneurship in an academic environment. We look forward to working closely with Greg within the TCII.

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is consistently ranked among the world’s leading science and technology universities.  Home to three of Israel’s five winners of the Nobel Prize in science, the Technion commands a worldwide reputation for its pioneering work in computer science, nanotechnology, biotechnology, energy, water-resource management, medicine, drug development, and aerospace.  Headquartered in New York City, the American Technion Society (ATS) promotes scientific and technological research and education at the Technion.