Craig Gotsman is the Dean of the Ying Wu College of Computing at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he is a Distinguished Professor. Before NJIT, he was co-founder of the Cornell Tech campus in New York City and Founding Director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute there. Gotsman has also co-founded several technology startup companies and consulted to many large technology corporations.
Early life
Born in the UK, Gotsman spent his early childhood in South Africa. His family immigrated to Israel in 1973. He was awarded all his academic degrees, including a PhD in Computer Science in 1991, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During 1984–89, Gotsman served as an officer in the Technological R&D Unit of the Israel Defense Forces, retiring from active reserve duty in 2005 with the rank of major.
Gotsman played a leading role in the formation of the Cornell Tech campus in New York City. Cornell Tech is an applied sciences campus dedicated to fostering innovation and producing entrepreneurial engineers, a project conceived and driven by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York City Economic Development Corporation, with the purpose of growing the tech sector of NYC. In 2011, Gotsman helped develop the proposal to establish an Applied Sciences campus, submitted by Cornell University and Technion to the City of New York. The proposal subsequently won the bid, competing against a number of groups of international universities, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. Technion was cited as "the MIT of Israel" and a key player because of its innovation culture and contribution to the emergence of Israel as a global technological superpower, as documented in the book "Startup Nation". In 2011, Gotsman was appointed Deputy Senior Vice-President at Technion, responsible for the joint Technion-Cornell venture. In Feb 2012 he was appointed Founding Director of the joint Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute at Cornell Tech. In this role, Gotsman developed a number of novel academic and entrepreneurial programs, including the successful Runway program, supporting PhDs forming commercial ventures based on their deep technical expertise. He also engaged in faculty and student recruiting, corporate relations, media relations and fund raising. In April 2013, he helped raise a $133M naming gift from Joan and Irwin M. Jacobs of San Diego.
In 2017, Gotsman was named Distinguished Professor and Dean of the Ying Wu College of Computing at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Entrepreneurship
Gotsman co-founded three startup companies: Virtue3D was founded in 1997 and developed advanced technologies for Web-based 3D computer graphics based on Technion intellectual property. The principal investors were Zohar and Yehuda Zisapel and Eurofund. The technology was eventually acquired by German Mental Images, itself later acquired by NVIDIA. Estimotion – a precursor to Waze – was founded in 2000 and developed technologies for real-time traffic-based applications for cellular phones. The principal investors were Partner/Orange Communications and Shlomo Group. Estimotion was acquired by British ITIS Holdings, itself later acquired by INRIX. CatchEye – commercializing 3D camera-related video-processing technology that Gotsman developed with colleagues at ETH Zurich – was founded in 2014 and acquired in 2017. Gotsman also co-founded in 2006 an active consulting company – Geometrika – which develops graphics and geometric software technologies.
Other Activities
Outreach
While at Technion, Gotsman served as Associate Dean for Computing during 2001–2003. He also founded its Industrial Affiliates Program and Alumni Program and served as Associate Dean for External Relations during 2005–2008.
Industrial Activity
Gotsman served as consultant for HP Labs in Haifa and spent summers during 1993–1996 at HP Labs in Palo Alto. He has also consulted for companies in Israel, Europe and the US, including Nokia, Shell Oil, Disney, Intel, Rafael, Autodesk and Samsung.
