Jana Thompson

Bio

Primary Research Area: Engaged Social Design & Organization Strategies
Secondary Domain: Spatial and Environmental Design

Jana currently works on the Alexa team at Amazon and lives in Seattle. Her career has centered on language, data, and cognition, how these are expressed in digital form, and their impact on human life.

Jana recently finished a year and a half research position at the Machine Learning for Language at NYU where she helped develop benchmarking data sets for large language models while finishing her master’s degree in UX design at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She was one of seven finalists in the UP/Start Venture Competition for her project Mira, a personalized avatar for aiding individuals with their day-to-day well-being.

In her rare spare time, Jana enjoys hiking and foraging wild foods in the Pacific Northwest and creating aural art pieces with AI.

Research Interest

Jana’s recent research has focused on interaction with intelligent agents, benchmarking for large language models, and reimagining human experiences with non-human life in light of climate change. In the program at NC State, she will continue her work on digital explorations of climate change, the environment and language in the post-anthropocene.