Hello!

My name is Jacob Waite.

I am a programmer/researcher/language enthusiast from Portland, Oregon. I am passionate about learning new things and doing work where I get to engage with the latest theory and research. After graduating from Harvey Mudd College with high honors in 2017 with a bachelor's in CS, I moved to Ibaraki, Japan to work as an assistant language teacher in the Japanese government run JET program. Ibaraki is a prefecture (similar to a "state" or "province") near Tokyo, but far enough that there is plenty of countryside. Getting to learn about the Japanese education system and see day-to-day life in schools was fascinating, and I had a great time there. I even got to put my CS skills to use by writing a small Jeapordy clone (see the Projects page) that we used in the classroom as an activity!

After about 9 months as an assistant language teacher, I moved to Tokyo to begin work as a software engineer at Lifematics Inc. I wanted the chance to experience life in Tokyo, do a job more in-line with my long-term profession (computer science), and challenge myself to do this work in a Japanese language environment. Essentially all of my communication with my colleagues and clients, along with project descriptions and design specs, were in Japanese. It was a fun challenge, and I was able to grow a lot through the process. The main project I worked on was helping a major Japanese construction firm migrate an RPA and JavaScript codebase to Python and Windows Powershell. After a number of months on the project, I eventually becme the lead developer, and started managing another developer. By the time I was the lead dev, I had learned a lot about the project and the challenges I saw in the development process. I completely changed the design of the codebase going forward for the second part of the project, which included creating a Python library for better handling the structural engineering data the program worked with. I also made a dummy-data generator for testing that was way faster than running actual structural simulations when testing the code! Throughout the development process, I communicated closely with the client to make sure the program was implementing the behavior they wanted.

After almost a year at Lifematics Inc. I became a master's student at the University of Southern California. During that time, I made sure to take classes related to my passion of AI/ML! I also took classes related to web development and multimedia technologies (learning about how different media types like audio, images, and video are stored and compressed). I also joined a research group at the USC Big Data in Biotransport Center composed of researchers from USC and the University of Cincinnati. We worked on applying neural networks to a task in medicine using Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). I worked to reimplement the original MatLab data pipeline for training the neural net using TensorFlow. I then spent countless hours finetuning different models, while also coming up with and testing some ideas for improving model performance. I am now first author on a paper we have submitted to a journal for review!

I graduated last December, and am now looking to start the next chapter in of my career!