john baker

Ran the technical operation of a local campaign for County Council At-Large. Designed copy and creative for digital advertisements in a variety of media, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and video ads. Over 85,000 actions were taken as a result of ads in our universe of ~150,000 likely voters. Used A/B testing to optimize campaign performance, and retargeting to encourage volunteering and donations. Designed and wrote copy for candidate's website and email blasts. Assisted in day to day campaign operation, including fundraising, volunteer recruitment, and community outreach. Helped first-time candidate win over 24,000 votes, receiving 6th of out 33rd place.

Built software tools to help perform portfolio analysis on data sets of up to tens of millions of documents. Performed independent research to develop visualization techniques to guide biomedical research. Developed Natural Language topic models, semantic clustering tools, and machine learning models to mine, clean, and categorize unstructured biomedical text.

Oversaw the data operation of Jess King's campaign for Pennylvania's 11th Congressional district. Improved efficiency of data entry, compiled visualizations and reports for the field team, and helped optimize voter targeting for the last few months of the campaign. Implemented statistical models to identify the most persuadable Republicans and Independents, which improved support rates and allowed us to significantly out-perform Democratic candidates in previous cycles.

* Trained and managed a staff of 50 lifeguards, 14 of who worked at a given time * ran in-service drills * responsible for physical maintenance and oversight of facilities * hired and scheduled swim instructors * maintained records for the swim lesson program * handled parents’ questions and concerns.

Licensed to maintain pool facilities. Developed leadership skills in coordinating pool staff and assisting patrons.

Developed responsibility in watching patrons, working with a team and learning how to operate in times of crisis.

Developed responsibility in watching patrons, working with a team and learning how to operate in times of crisis.

Maintains database of Voter Roles used to target voters, create models, and mobilize citizens. I have helped clean and analyze data for the state party, helping candidates up and down the ticket. As part of my job I took ownership of maintaining and developing several apps to inform and engage voters. This was a full stack position, as I was responsible for gathering and entering data, writing server-side code, and altering the front-end as well. As part of the project, I managed a team of volunteers to assist in gathering and organizing the data.

I am responsible for analyzing the topic models created from our data mining historical texts. I helped curate data for our web visualization, using a combination of quantitative computational methods and more humanistic close readings.

Both Grinnell College and the University of Iowa collaborated on a digital humanities study of Shakespeare and Renaissance England. We developed practices like semantic indexing, natural language processing, topic modeling and other “big data” mining techniques to analyze over 40,000 historic texts. I personally helped to integrate Latent Dirichlet Allocation modeling, word2vec, topic2vec and other forms of semantic analysis into our build to aid in macro level historical analysis. The goal was to create a website allowing users to perform their own analysis. I was also responsible for developing features to make the user experience more intuitive and comprehensive.

Gotten a well rounded liberal education in both Computer Science as well as the humanities.