CarolineJaffe

CAROLINE JAFFE


ABOUT

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.


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.