Jacob Jaffe
Associate
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJacob Jaffe is an AI research scientist with nine years of experience blending rigorous academic research and hands-on engineering to uncover hidden patterns in large complex systems. With a PhD from MIT and a postdoc at Stanford, he has applied statistical, ML, and RL techniques to problems from election administration and survey analysis to LLM safety and verified-reward reinforcement learning. He pairs experimental lab work—now exploring living neurons for next-generation computing at The Biological Computing Co.—with practical software skills in Python, R, JavaScript, and open-source contributions to privacy-focused projects like the COVID Safe Paths front end. Jacob is equally comfortable leading interdisciplinary teams and shipping UX-focused bug fixes, localization, and accessibility improvements. Based in Palo Alto, he combines deep theory (queueing theory, combinatorics, SBERT pipelines) with a knack for translating technical results into actionable insights for nontechnical stakeholders.
9 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Political Science and Government, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Political Science and Government at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBachelor's degree Statistics, Bachelor's degree Statistics at Rice University
Github Skills (11)
uid10
react-native-ios10
javascript10
react-native10
mobile-development10
front-end-development10
ui-design10
react10
ux-design9
localization8
accessibility8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
Path-Check/safeplaces-dct-app
May 2020 - Aug 2020
COVID Safe Paths (based on Private Kit) is an open and privacy preserving system to use personal information to battle COVID
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:206 commits, 170 PRs, 267 pushes in 2 months
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily focused on front-end development tasks, specifically addressing UI and UX aspects of the application. They fixed a bug related to the checkbox "checked" state and updated an SVG icon, enhancing the visual feedback for users. Moreover, the user contributed significantly to the new E2E transfer flow, which involved designing and implementing input screens, localization, and accessibility adjustments, improving the application's functionality and user experience.
privacybattlepathspersonal-informationpersonal-use
JumboCode/HSHS
Oct 2017 - Apr 2018
Harvard Square Homeless Shelter
Contributions:158 commits, 78 pushes, 5 branches in 6 months
homelesssheltersquareharvard
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