As students return to campus for the spring semester, CITY is kicking off 2019 with a vibrant lineup of programs.

For all the hype around cryptocurrency like bitcoin, it can be hard to know how to actually use it. That’s where Splash comes in: this team, founded by Yale students and a recent grad, aims to offer users an intuitive banking platform that makes it easier to spend cryptocurrency anywhere on the internet.

This fall, the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY) partnered with Yale’s La Casa Cultural (the Latino Cultural Center at Yale) and Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS) at the MacMillan Center to launch a program meant to empower students to develop new approaches to immigration issues: the Critical Innovation Fund.

This week, delegates from 195 countries are gathered in Poland to discuss the fate of the planet. The annual Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change runs for two weeks, bringing representatives of governments and civil society organizations together to negotiate progress on the major global agreements on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.

From CITY’s inception, serving students has been its top priority. But what does that look like in practice? To help us figure that out, we’ve convened a Student Advisory Board (SAB) composed of students nominated from each of Yale’s schools, from Yale College to professional schools like law and nursing.

As virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies become increasingly accessible, the big question on many people’s minds is how these new tools will translate to meaningful applications.

Under the bright lights of the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design (CEID), a trio of students ripped into a small collection of Amazon packages. Though their delight with the newly acquired wares may have confused an unknowing spectator walking past the floor-to-ceiling windows on Prospect Street, to Jonara Jimenez, Enrique Martinez, and Diane Yu, the contents of the package — an assortment of pastel-colored foam hair rollers — represented the exciting possibilities for their team, Team Highlights.

“Your mother is in the fridge, and you must feed her.” This instruction may have startled anyone passing through the Marsh Hall classroom on a Friday afternoon this October, but to those gathered around the table with Charlie Negaro Jr. of New Haven’s Atticus Bookstore Café, it was a mandate to begin their journey with sourdough bread making.

”Hoping to foster connections between the Yale Divinity School and the broader Yale community, several Divinity School students have founded ‘Divinnovation’ — a group that aims to support innovative faith-based projects and social impact work.