Georgia Tech is reshaping Midtown by making it not only a center for startups and research, but also a living classroom. Next spring, a new architecture studio class taught by Professor David Yocum will invite graduate students to imagine the future of one of Tech Square’s newest spaces: the Biltmore Block.

Known in Tech Square for her interdisciplinary work in interactive media and storytelling, Ph.D. candidate Shamim Shoomali has been making waves on the film-festival circuit with her short film Paw and Scissors.

On November 17, 2025, Georgia Tech hosted its first AI Career Fair. Throughout the inaugural event, the Georgia Tech Exhibition Hall was a hive of activity as over 500 students, interested in artificial intelligence (AI)-related career opportunities, engaged with nearly 30 employers to explore career paths, gain industry insights, and build professional networks. “This is an amazing event to have these opportunities to meet these employers in person. I have always gotten interviews from meeting people in person,” said a Georgia Tech student and computer science major.

Just as many of us are familiar with “reduce, reuse, recycle”, collaboration, community, and collective impact are central to building a resilient future and core elements of the Atlanta Sustainability Ambassador Program. On November 17th, 2025, the community-building milestone of empowering 500 ambassadors was celebrated at the City Council Meeting. Ambassadors shared stories about how the program has impacted their sustainability efforts in their businesses, workplaces, or at home.

By listening to communities and working with partners across education, industry, manufacturing, and the creative economy, Georgia Tech hopes to make innovation accessible to all 159 counties.

How to manage a digital footprint when someone passes away is becoming an increasingly prevalent question, but it has primarily been asked for older adults and focused on administrative tasks. TSRB researcher and Georgia Tech Human-Centered Computing Ph.D. student Soonho Kwon sought to learn how this field can be adapted to focus on the emotional needs of an overlooked group in death-tech: young adults.

For Georgia Tech’s Yanni Loukissas, the core question is simple: “How can we inspire people to use data as a means of changing the way they see the places they live?” His work shows that data can be more than numbers. “It can reshape how everyday residents understand and care for their communities.”

Velocity Startups, located in the historic Biltmore building, joins Georgia Tech’s commercialization ecosystem, solidifying the Institute’s role as a national leader and premier hub for startup growth.

In the startup or innovation space, things move lightning fast. In fact, waiting just a week for the next iteration of your customized circuit board to be printed could be a significant setback. “Startups move fast, and innovators need their circuit boards as quickly as possible. Waiting weeks for a specialized board isn’t an option. Convexity Electronics’ goal is to be more local and convenient,” shares Calla Scotch, Founder and Lead Technical Developer.

Through a tabletop game called Omertà Unbroken, Georgia Tech PhD candidate and cinematographer Cecile Zhang is turning AI anxiety into creative play. By reimagining filmmaking as a card-game collaboration, Zhang invites storytellers to debate, negotiate, and experiment.

It’s been 10 years since Rise of the Rest bus came to Atlanta, and a lot has changed. Entrepreneurial communities that were once just forming have now matured, early seeds have begun to bear fruit, and the city has emerged as a powerhouse — not just in the Southeast, but as it gears up to become one of the top five tech hubs in the country.

Turning raw information into actionable insights often takes weeks of manual work or costly consulting. Founded by Pavleen Thukral, Magic Data automates the messy processing that slows analysts down. Acting as a “virtual data analyst,” Magic Data’s tool cleans, organizes, and analyzes raw data, so humans don’t have to.

A record of 17 startups, focused on a diverse range of topics from healthcare and logistics to artificial intelligence and robotics, graduated from the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC)’s program on October 21. The event was held at the historic Biltmore Georgian Ballroom, located on the ground floor of the new Biltmore Innovation Center in Tech Square, and celebrated the 2025 ATDC Graduating Class and ATDC’s 45th Anniversary.

Pairing a lifelong interest in cooking, especially the gathering with friends and family around the table, with financial responsibility is what inspired Ivan Zou, the co-founder of Raccoon Eyes, to dig into the problem of food waste. Ivan shares, “When I started seeing how much food was being not eaten by students and wasted in kitchens, I was inspired to find a solution at the intersection of the kitchen and consumer that could help avoid both waste and economic cost.”

Imagine asking a virtual assistant technology to play your favorite song, only to have a different one start playing. Or providing a verbal command to a robotic tool, and it completes another action. Now imagine you are at the doctor’s office, where accuracy and precision are essential and lifesaving, and virtual assistant technology fails to understand or transcribe the correct information based on your unique voice, medical condition, accent, first language, tone, and more.