Jessica Anne Howe

345 N. 81 St. 
Seattle, WA  98103 
(206) 297-1552
(617) 803-3713 
howej@csail.mit.edu


Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science: 2004.
Living Machines and Humanoid Robotics research group, 
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA.  
B.S., double major in Mathematics and Computer Science: 2001.  
WWU Outstanding Graduate 2001. 

North Seattle Community College, Seattle, WA.  
A.S. Degree: 1998.


Related  experience

Research Assistant, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (2001 - 2004)
Expanded a distributed robotic control language, helped develop a hardware platform used to control autonomous mobile robots,  built an autonomous robot for testing hardware and software expansions. 

Teaching Assistant, MIT EECS Department (2003 - 2004)
Graduate course Techniques in Artificial Intelligence: developed Java infrastructures to be used in class assignments, led student recitations and course review sessions.

Program Manager, AT&T Research Labs, Florham Park, NJ  (2000 - 2001)
Developed spoken dialogue systems for use in an online chat community and in an automated calendar agent. 
Tasks included creating a dialogue parsing grammar, text to speech capabilities and system control architecture.


Leadership  Experience

Associate Director, MIT Women's Technology Program (2003)
Directed and oversaw academic course contents, technology usage, residences and staff relations  
for a high school summer academic program in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics.

Instructor, MIT Women's Technology Program (2002)
Developed curriculum and taught a course in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science.

Graduate Residence Tutor, MIT East Campus Dormitory (2002 - 2004)
Acted as hall advisor and liason between administration and undergraduate students.

Invited Speaker, MIT EECS Dangerous Ideas Seminar Series (2003)
Spoke on the status of women in the Computer Science field as a whole, at MIT, and in our department.  Explored noted reasons for gender discrepancies and obligations members of this community hold to address this situation.


Technical Skills

Windows, Mac and UNIX based operating systems.
Java, C, C++, Lisp, Scheme, Assembly, Perl and a variety of other programming languages. 
Strong background in mathematics, theoretical computer science, algorithms, distributed systems and networks.
Interests focus on distributed systems, networks, emergent behavior and genetic algorithms.
Fluent in Spanish.


Outside Interests

Playing traditional Irish music: Irish flute, whistle, tenor banjo, mandolin 
Tap dancing, Irish step dancing
Ultimate frisbee, ice hockey
