Agentic tools in the writing studio: what the drafts actually looked like
Two sections, same prompt, one with agent feedback in the loop. The interesting result wasn't quality — it was revision behavior.
New York Institute of Technology
Catalyst Grants — Sep 2026
The Emerging Technologies Group[ ETG ]
Faculty‑built. Future‑facing. Deliberately early.
A cross-college collective for emerging technology — seeding experiments before they're safe bets, putting unfamiliar tools in faculty hands, and publishing what actually happened when we tried them in a real classroom.
What it is
A standing faculty collective inside New York Institute of Technology, formed in 2023 and drawing from all six colleges across Long Island, Manhattan, and Jonesboro, Arkansas.
What it does
Funds early experiments through Catalyst Grants, publishes what happened in Emerging @NY Tech, keeps a shared equipment library, and runs open sessions on every campus.
Who it's for
Any New York Tech faculty or staff member with a question they can't answer yet — and the students who end up building the answer with them.
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Catalyst Grants
Seed funding for work that is too early, too weird, or too cross-disciplinary for a conventional line item.
Announcement · Cycle 04 · AY 2026–27
ETG Catalyst Grants open September 23, 2026.
Awards of up to $15,000 for New York Tech faculty and staff prototyping with emerging technology — XR, applied AI, robotics, edge sensing, digital fabrication, simulation, and whatever doesn't have a category yet. Open across all three campuses — Long Island, Manhattan, and Jonesboro, Arkansas — and cross-campus teams are prioritized. Funded work is expected to surface publicly in Emerging @NY Tech within the year.
$15K
Max award
10–14
Projects funded
12 mo
Project window
3
Campuses eligible
Countdown to RFP release
Cycle timeline
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Days
--
Hrs
--
Min
--
Sec
- Sep 23Information & RFP release
- Oct 21Application deadline
- Nov 4Award announcements
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Where to start
Eight rooms in the same building. Wander into whichever one is closest to what you're working on.
01 — Channel
Emerging @NY Tech
Field notes from faculty across all six colleges: what they built, what broke, what they'd do differently. Written by the people who ran the experiment, not the people who wrote the press release.
- XR Teaching structural analysis inside a headset
- AI What happened when agents graded the first draft
- IoT A $40 sensor rig for envelope testing
AI Corner
Briefings, tool teardowns with an honest verdict, and classroom-ready policy language. Updated when something actually changes.
- Brief Detection tools remain unreliable — do this instead
- Lab Auto-generated quiz banks: with care
- Policy Syllabus language in three postures
Catalyst Grants
Up to $15K to try the thing. Opens September 23, 2026.
See the call 04 — AccessThe Sandbox
Reserve the gear. Headsets, capture rigs, print farm, edge boxes, one very patient robot arm.
Check availability 05 — LiveTech Talks & Build Nights
Short demos, long questions, no slides longer than ten. All three campuses, plus a stream.
See what's next 06 — ToolkitThe Tech Workshop
A full AI and automation suite for instructors and students — assistants, workflow automation, and course tooling that works today, not next semester. Built and maintained alongside ETG.
Open the Workshop 07 — DigestSignal
One monthly email. Five things that changed, one thing worth ignoring, and where the grant money went.
Subscribe 08 — StudentsStudent Innovators
Paid fellowships pairing students with funded faculty projects. Applications follow the grant cycle.
Fellowship details
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Emerging @NY Tech
Where faculty post dispatches — short, first-person notes about work in progress. Published while it's still unfinished, which is the point.
dispatch n. — three paragraphs, a photo, and an honest result. No abstract, no citations, no waiting until it works.
- DSP / 012 Teaching structural analysis inside a headset School of Architecture and Design · third-year studio pilot, 41 students XR
- DSP / 011 What happened when we let agents grade the first draft College of Arts and Sciences · two sections, one very long rubric AI
- DSP / 010 A $40 sensor rig for building envelope testing College of Engineering and Computing Sciences · with facilities, on a real roof IoT
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AI Corner
Practical, current, and unsentimental. No hype, no doom, no thirty-slide deck about the fourth industrial revolution.
The part where we tell you what's actually usable.
ETG runs tools through real coursework before recommending them. Everything here has been used by a New York Tech instructor with real students and a real deadline — including the ones we're telling you to skip.
Last updatedThis week
Tools evaluated34
Recommended11
Office hoursThu · 2–4 PM
Our full AI & automation suite for instructors and students.
Read
Detection tools remain unreliable. Here's what to do instead.
A short, defensible framework for assignment design that doesn't depend on catching anyone.
Running a capable model on the hardware already in your lab
Cost, privacy, and latency math for keeping student data off third-party servers.
etg@ai-corner:~$ ls briefings/ | wc -l → 41
Transcription & lecture capture
Accuracy is solved. Accessibility workflow and FERPA posture are not — read the storage terms before you upload a class.
Auto-generated quiz banks
Fast first pass, unusable without review. Budget the time you thought you were saving.
"AI grading" suites for open-ended work
Consistent, confident, and wrong in ways that correlate with student writing style. Not yet.
etg@ai-corner:~$ cat verdicts.md → 11 use · 15 with-care · 8 skip
Syllabus language, three postures
Copy-paste blocks for permitted, restricted, and required-disclosure course policies.
Student disclosure statement
Six lines students attach to submitted work. Low friction, high signal.
Bring-your-assignment office hours
Thursdays, 2–4 PM. Bring one assignment; leave with a version that survives contact with a chatbot.
etg@ai-corner:~$ ./book-clinic --day thu
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The Sandbox
Equipment you shouldn't have to write a grant to touch. Reserve by the week, training included, shipped between campuses on request.
XR Bay
Standalone and tethered headsets, hand-tracking, room-scale capture volume.
4 slots open
Capture Kit
LiDAR scanner, photogrammetry rig, calibrated lighting, ambisonic audio.
2 slots open
Print Farm
Multi-material FDM bank plus resin. Queue is public; jobs run overnight.
Queue: 6 jobs
Edge Cluster
GPU-class single-board nodes for on-device inference and offline demos.
Available
Robot Arm
Collaborative 6-axis arm with vision. Safe for teaching, patient with beginners.
Training req'd
Sensor Library
Environmental, structural, and biometric modules with pre-built loggers.
Available
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Tech Talks
Thirty minutes of demo, thirty minutes of argument. Long Island, Manhattan, and Jonesboro — streamed all three ways.
09Sep 2026
Build Night: local models, zero cloud
Bring a laptop. Leave with something running on it. No prior ML required.
24Sep 2026
Grant clinic: writing a Catalyst proposal
Walkthrough of the RFP, budget norms, and the three reasons proposals get sent back.
15Oct 2026
Showcase: what the 2025 cohort built
Six projects, six tables, one hour. Demos you can put your hands on.
29Oct 2026
Simulation lab open house
Synthetic-voice standardized patients and haptic trainers, demonstrated by the people running them.
Signal — the ETG monthly
Five things that changed. One worth ignoring.
Short, skimmable, and written for people who teach. No tracking pixels, no "thought leadership," unsubscribe in one click.
Monthly · open to all New York Tech faculty, staff & students
✦ You're on the list. First issue lands at the top of the month.