CarolineJaffe

CAROLINE JAFFE

engineering / agriculture / cities


ABOUT

I'm currently a Ph.D. candidate and graduate research assistant in the Responsive Environments group at the MIT Media Lab, working with Professor Joe Paradiso. Finding creative and thoughtful ways to apply technology to issues of sustainability and human behavior has been one of the key goals of my graduate work. My research focuses on developing sensor technologies to support sustainable agriculture and food systems.

I received my S.M. from the Media Lab in June 2017; during my Master's, I worked with Professor Sep Kamvar in the Social Computing group, where I worked on software and hardware to support scalable and replicable social processes that impact urban environments. For my Master's thesis, I built a blockchain-based financial incentives system to encourage urban cycling. Before graduate school, I worked as a software engineer at Fitbit Boston, and spent a year living in Delft (NL) doing research on a Fulbright fellowship. For my Fulbright research, I applied machine learning and natural language processing techniques to social media data to analyze bicycle commuting habits, in an effort to apply my computer science background to my interest in bicycling and sustainable urban transportation. I received my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Yale in 2013.

When I'm not working with sensors, computers, or data, I generally try to get outside (favorites include biking, hiking, and exploring cities by foot or bike), make pottery, go to museums, listen to live music (like this talented young band), read, write letters, try new restaurants, knit, or make tentative culinary forays. I also love maps!


PROJECT PORTFOLIO

Determining Grape Ripeness
Tomato Plant Sensors (6.115 Class Project)
Motivating Urban Cycling (S.M. thesis)
Placelet
Road Quality Sensor
Bamboo Bicycles Boston
How to Make (Almost) Anything
Cambridge Bicycle Committee
Pottery
MIT Transportation Club
Sacred Grocery
Civic Tech Hackathon
Exploring Cycling Attitudes
Fitbit Personal Coach
Where Does BART Belong?
Quadcopter Sensing System
The Odd Keepon Out
Investigating PDMS Bonding Methods
The Great Transit Mapping Debate
Architecture

FABRICATION

In Fall 2015, I took Professor Neil Gershenfeld's (in)famous "How to Make (Almost) Anything" class. Neil is the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, which is co-located with the Media Lab in MIT Building E14. Each week of the class, we learned a different digital fabrication technique, and then completed a project using that technique. Please see this page for pictures and in-depth explanations of my weekly projects.