Jen Luo

Jen Luo

Designer/Engineer in Los Angeles

About

Jen is a software engineer. She's worked most intimately within the communications space, with a penchant for journalism, social networks, and digital media.

Contact

Work Experience

2022 — 2023
San Francisco
  • Secured a $65k grant for a hyper-local election reporting tool.

  • Scraped election data and hosted dynamic election visualizations from 11 San Francisco Bay Area counties using React/Node/Postgres/Vercel/Python/GCP for use by 2 partner news organizations in 2022 Midterm Elections.

2023 — 2023
Course Assistant at Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Research Seminar
Stanford
  • Advised 11 student research projects (concept, system design, evaluation) for a course on the major animating theories of human-computer interaction, including ubiquitous computing, social computing, design tools+methods, AI+HCI, augmented and virtual reality, collaboration, and accessibility.
2022 — 2022
User Experience Researcher at Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Research Seminar
Stanford
  • Co-authored novel HCI study on digital representation and personal memory via enabling novice users to make high-level edits on panoramas.

  • Built direct manipulation interface integrating Google Street View data in React/Python.

  • Led 18 hours of user studies (A/B testing, usability testing, and benchmarking) with 18 participants, later presented results at Stanford’s HCI Forum.

2022 — 2022
San Francisco
  • First female engineering hire.
  • Shipped 30+ bug/feature PRs, including inventory table filters/tallies, bulk-edit product proposals, and product previews.
  • Worked across every product surface (inventory, curation, proposals) in React/TypeScript/Vercel/GraphQL.
  • Led 10-week pilot UX research on UserTesting with senior designers to streamline onboarding processes, reducing onboarding time by 50%.
2022 — 2022
Junior Software Engineer at Note
San Francisco
  • Owned product and design in team of 5 with weekly sprints for a video game with memory-based music puzzles.

  • Conducted 20 hours of user interviews in 3 playtests with 9 users, refining game mechanics and user experience.

  • Created game assets in Blender and developed game in Unity.

2017 — 2022
Research Assistant at Stanford University
  • Developed interactive maps in ArcGIS and React to contextualize a Greek translation of an ancient text, published in Stanford’s digital humanities research anthology at Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis in 2022.

  • Created Tableau database of archival papers for use on the role of philanthropy in public schools for Stanford's Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society in 2020. Paper forthcoming in "Parent Teacher Organization's Mobilization and Fundraising in K-12 Education" in "Philanthropy and Education."

  • Scraped reports of civilian casualties using Twitter APIs and various local news media to track and validate casualty counts for Mills Legal Clinic in 2018. Final report published by Stanford Law School.

2021 — 2021
Junior Software Engineer at Impart
San Francisco
  • Owned product and design on 4-person design/engineering team to create a collaborative platform for artists.

  • Shipped Android application using React Native.

  • Conducted 40 hours of user testing (heuristic evaluations, developing personas, experience prototyping) with 10 users using Figma and Sketch.

2019 — 2019
District of Columbia
  • Conducted in-depth user interviews with 10 self-represented litigant interviews, analyzed civic procedures across 50 states, and presented data-driven recommendations to magistrate judges.

  • Produced an educational video guide for self-represented litigants, translating complex legal processes into user-friendly language, published in 2020.

Projects

2022
AI-based Discord moderation bot
  • Developed a Discord bot in Python to detect and remove child sexual abuse material.
  • Used CNNs for image classification with a 77% accuracy rate & hash-based databases to reduce moderator exposure to harmful content.
2021
Single-page photo-sharing application
  • Developed a single-page photo-sharing application with integrated third party applications using React/Vercel/Firebase.
  • Implemented user stories, user profiles, mentions, privacy controls, and liking/favoriting.
2021
Concurrent proxy server
  • Implemented a concurrent proxy server in C++ to efficiently handle client requests, block specific websites using strikesets, cache static resources for faster retrieval, and support secure HTTPS passthrough.
2020
Custom heap allocator
  • Build a custom heap allocator in C for low-level memory handling, complete with block recycling, coalescing, and in-place realloc for efficient memory management, making performance optimizations using Valgrind.

Education

2023 — Now
M.S. in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University

Coursework: Human-Computer Interaction Research, Design for Play, Design for Behavior Change, Social Computing, Computational Journalism

2017 — 2023
B.S. in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University

Coursework: Trust and Safety Engineering, Mathematical Foundations of Computing, Principles of Computer Systems, Object-Oriented Systems Design, Web Applications, Cross- Platform Mobile Development, Applied Matrix Theory, Data Structures and Algorithms

Writing

2019

Exploring the effects of different kinds of associations on social trust levels, in order to better observe how particular kinds of associational networks could have distinct effects on trust in social networks.