As the URL suggests, my name is Nathan Cooper Jones, but these days I’m finding Nate to be a bit more efficient (a third fewer letters, zero loss of information). I’m a data scientist currently living in Chicago.
The best way to reach me is a message on LinkedIn. You can also browse my projects or read my resume (PDF).
I currently work at LTK.
Before this, I worked at Condé Nast, where I built a natural language processing algorithm specifically designed to analyze long bodies of text (thousands of tokens); The Mom Project, where I built the next generation of our match algorithm, which pairs projects with relevant talent, talent with relevant projects, talent with relevant talent, and projects with relevant projects – all in a single model; ShopRunner, where I built their next generation of recommendations, internally known as Collie; Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, where I worked to deprecate the GD-IQ with a new model known as Fire Saga, a multi-task classification model able to identify, classify, and cluster faces of characters in film, TV, and advertisements on a handful of perceived identities.
Before all of that, I was a lot of different things – I was a research assistant at the Computational Physiology Lab @ the University of Houston for a summer, a tap dance instructor, a tutor, a researcher (somehow very different work than the aforementioned research assistant), a T.A., a web developer… a whole lot. I started teaching dance at the age of 14 and have worked since then doing something!
When I’m not doing work, I’m usually ranting about how great Taco Bell is, eating Taco Bell, or planning my next visit to Taco Bell. I also love taking walks around Chicago with my wife Jen, trying to inject sourdough into as much of my baking as possible, watching The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (guilty pleasure), and Taco Bell. In the past, I used to be a professional dancer (proof) and musician (drums growing up, but learning to play bass in my adult life).
When I was in college and thought I was really funny, this used to be a much stupider page. If you’d like to see that, I’ve archived it.