As of January 2024, I have started a job at X, the Moonshot Factory (formerly Google X) working on geospatial machine learning and climate risk.
I received my Ph.D. from the Responsive Environments group at the MIT Media Lab, advised by Professor Joe Paradiso. My thesis was titled An Environmental and Economic Systems Analysis of Land Use Decisions in the Massachusetts Cranberry Industry, and focused on using geospatial data and climate modeling to help Massachusetts cranberry farmers make climate-friendly land use decisions. Using satellite and sensor data, I calibrated and deployed models that quantified and compared the environmental and economic outcomes of different land use scenarios, and built and evaluated a web-based geospatial decision-support tool for farmers to explore these outcomes.
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 spent a year living in Delft (NL) doing research on a Fulbright fellowship, applying machine learning and natural language processing techniques to analyze bicycle commuting habits. I received my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Yale in 2013. In my personal life, I like to get outdoors (favorite activities include road biking, hiking, and exploring cities by foot, bike, or public transit), make pottery, write letters, explore new restaurants, and attempt ambitious baking projects.
Highly intermittant thoughts on grad school, farming, bicycling, computer science, women in STEM, general news, and more...
Pan-Mass Challenge Ride Reflection - August 11, 2019
Air Travel in Academia (on ML Medium site) - July 30, 2019
Reflections on Jackson (the film) - March 11, 2017
MAS Ambassadors (on ML Medium site) - March 31, 2016
Media Lab Application Advice - December 3, 2015
Fulbright Application Advice - August 6, 2015
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.
Caroline Jaffe 2019