New York, New York, United States
UX Engineer in LLM-driven product development; creative technologist; and occasional gamedev/wacky installation art creator. I specialize in rapid prototyping and R&D. Nowadays I work mostly with foundation models (FMs) and large language models (LLMs). I work in the practical and academic ends of tech: from quick-and-dirty prototypes to launched code to peer-reviewed academic papers. Equally at home presenting cutting-edge work on stage, or building goofy ephemeral art with a scrappy team in the back of a U-Haul. You can see my full CV (including shows, press, and awards/commissions) at janefriedhoff.com/cv. I also write about tech and topics in game studies at jfriedhoff.medium.com/
Part of the Fall 2019 cohort of Humans In Research, a position intended to energize the spirit of research at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program by pulling in and supporting artists doing work at the bleeding edge of their fields. As part of the residency, taught a 4-credit class called Joy + Games, which synthesized understandings of joy from games, art, philosophy, and political activism, and which taught how to design cathartic and co-liberatory experiences for players.
Worked a 2 year full-time contract for Google (via Adecco) to prototype and develop delightful, engaging, and future-thinking experiments with the Google Creative Lab. Fulfilling roles from prototyper to production coder to developer relations and more. In addition to proprietary/internal code and prototypes, public-facing responsibilities included: - Development of three of the thirteen flagship projects for the new AR Experiments platform: Blocks Thrower, Hidden World, and the open-source Portal Painter. - Development of the Creative Lab's AR lyrics video for Grace Vanderwaal's Moonlight. - Extensive code, UX design, and prototyping for the Google Creative Lab's Morse Experiments keyboard and collection, which was debuted by Google CEO Sundar Pichai at I/O 2018 and won several Webby awards (Webby Winner & People's Voice for Apps, Mobile, and Voice: Technical Achievement; Webby Winner for Apps, Mobile, and Voice: Best User Experience). - Running the Morse Code Game Jam with partners at the Adaptive Design Association to create an ecosystem of bespoke games for children learning Morse. - Prototyping, design, development, and release of Move Mirror, an AI experiment that matches your webcam pose against hundreds of photographs, frame-by-frame, in real time, using machine learning models in the browser which has been shown at official Google events around the globe. Helped facilitate the porting and open sourcing of the PoseNet model for Tensorflow.js. - Prototyping, UX, and development of Drawalong AR, an exploratory augmented reality experiment around learning drawing from YouTube videos in augmented reality. - Writing framework for processing, analysis, and similarity determination of poses for "Approaching 21," a part of the Body, Movement, Language collection of AI dance sketches with acclaimed dancer Bill T. Jones.
Developed data visualizations and tools to promote data literacy until the closure of the studio in 2017. Projects included the Elephant Atlas, a data visualization and exploration platform in collaboration with the Great Elephant Census; the v2 of Floodwatch, a platform to help people uncover, interpret, and understand data about how advertisers are tracking them; and the St Louis Maproom, a community space for creating and exploring original, interpretive maps of the city that reflect the personal stories and lived experiences of its residents.
Developed prototypes with emerging technologies to explore the social and cultural impact of these technologies on the future of news and media. Projects included Madison, a crowdsourcing project to uncover new metadata about the company's extensive archives of historical advertisements; Particles, a research project and set of prototypes about collecting metadata and its impact on news publishing and platform flexibility; and Membrane, an experiment in permeable publishing.