Jerome White

Hi! I’m Jerome. This website details some of my professional activities.

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Experience

Professional

I am a computer scientist who enjoys building technology to address societal challenges. I currently do this at Project Tech4Dev, where I lead efforts to integrate LLMs into Glific and Dalgo.

Prior to Tech4Dev, I was with Wadhwani AI (2018–2023) and IBM Research India (2011-2014). At Wadhwani AI I was involved in efforts to enhance decision making for smallholder farmers [1–4], government COVID responders [5–8], and maternal and child health care workers [9]. Some of our work is open source [10–12], and was enhanced by the broader ML community [13–15]. I was also able to watch the organization’s journey to maturity, having joined when there were about a dozen people to over 200 when I left.

At IBM Research I was part of the Spoken Web group, delivering internet-like services through interactive voice response platforms [16–19]. Some of the outcomes of this work were innovations in conversational systems [20], and in low-resource spoken document retrieval [21–25].

Academic

For four years I was a lecturer at NYU Abu Dhabi (2014–2018). I taught two undergraduate courses, both pertaining to computer programming. In “Introduction to Computer Science,” Python was used to teach students foundational concepts of the field. In “Software Engineering,” Java was used to instill objected oriented design patterns, mobile app development, and principles of professional software life cycles. I also occasionally delivered lectures on information retrieval and trends in low-resource speech technologies.

In addition to teaching I mentored senior capstones [26–28], did a bit of research on automobile traffic patterns [29], and sat on the NYUAD Institutional Review Board.

Education

I received a PhD from the California Institute of Technology for applying formal methods to distributed algorithms [30–36]. There were lots of false starts before stumbling on that topic: I explored network packet buffer dynamics in the Linux kernel [37, 38], and thought about web browsers as operating systems [39, 40].

I have a bachelors degree in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. During that time I was graciously allowed into a research group, where I got my first publication [41].

Service

Supporting Materials

[1]
Agrawal, C. et al. “Maintaining User Trust Through Multistage Uncertainty Aware Inference.” Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Deployable AI Workshop, 2024.
[2]
White, J. et al. “BOLLWM: A Real-World Dataset for Bollworm Pest Monitoring from Cotton Fields in India.” International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Workshop on Practical Machine Learning for Developing Countries, 2023.
[3]
White, J. et al. “A Case for Rejection in Low Resource ML Deployment.” Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). Workshop on Challenges In Deploying And Monitoring Machine Learning Systems, 2022.
[4]
Dalmia, A. et al. “Pest Management in Cotton Farms: An AI-System Case Study from the Global South.” International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). ACM, 2020.
[5]
Jain, S. et al. “A Flexible Data-Driven Framework for COVID-19 Case Forecasting Deployed in a Developing-World Public Health Setting.” AI for Social Impact, M. Tambe et al., eds. 2022.
[6]
Cramer, E.Y. et al. “Evaluation of Individual and Ensemble Probabilistic Forecasts of COVID-19 Mortality in the United States.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 119(15). 2022.
[7]
Deva, A. et al. “Interpretability of Epidemiological Models: The Curse of Non-Identifiability.” International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). AI for Public Health Workshop, 2021.
[8]
Bannur, N. et al. “Synthetic Data Generation for Improved COVID-19 Epidemic Forecasting.” medRxiv, 2020.
[9]
Khandelwal, Y. et al. “NurtureNet: A Multi-Task Video-Based Approach for Newborn Anthropometry.” Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). Workshop on Computer Vision for Physiological Measurement, 2024.
[10]
“Pest Management Open Data.” https://github.com/WadhwaniAI/pest-management-opendata; GitHub, 2023.
[11]
“Pest Monitoring.” https://github.com/WadhwaniAI/pest-monitoring; GitHub, 2022.
[12]
“Covid Modelling.” https://github.com/WadhwaniAI/covid-modelling; GitHub, 2021.
[13]
White, J. “Automated Pest Recognition for Smallholder Cotton Farmers.” Easy RIDER: Real-time IDentification for Ecological Research; Monitoring; WILDLABS, 2023.
[14]
White, J. “ZindiWeekendz: Wadhwani AI Bollworm Classification Challenge.” Zindi, 2022.
[15]
Lim, A. et al. “Out-of-Distribution Image Detection in AI-Based Pest Management App.” Master’s thesis. Harvard University, 2022.
[16]
White, J. and Duggirala, M. “Speech-Interface Prompt Design: Lessons from the Field.” International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD). ACM, 2015.
[17]
Ramakrishna, V. et al. “An Un-Tethered Mobile Shopping Experience.” Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (MobiQuitous). Springer, 2014.
[18]
White, J. et al. “Expansion Methods for Job-Candidate Matching Amidst Unreliable and Sparse Data.” International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING). ACL, 2012.
[19]
White, J. et al. “Designing a Voice-Based Employment Exchange for Rural India.” International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD). ACM, 2012.
[20]
White, J. et al. “Simulating Early-Termination Search for Verbose Spoken Queries.” Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). ACL, 2013.
[21]
White, J. and Oard, D.W. “Simulating Zero-Resource Spoken Term Discovery.” Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). ACM, 2017.
[22]
Oard, D.W. et al. “Vapor Engine: Demonstrating an Early Prototype of a Language-Independent Search Engine for Speech.” Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR). ACM, 2016.
[23]
White, J. et al. “Using Zero-Resource Spoken Term Discovery for Ranked Retrieval.” Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT). ACL, 2015.
[24]
Oard, D.W. et al. “A Test Collection for Spoken Gujarati Queries.” International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR). ACM, 2015.
[25]
Oard, D.W. et al. “The FIRE 2013 Question Answering for the Spoken Web Task.” Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE). ACM, 2013.
[26]
Stara, Z. “Spatial Distortion Approach to Traffic Congestion Visualization.” Master’s thesis. New York University Abu Dhabi, 2016.
[27]
Csapo, G. “Classifying Face Representations with Noise Tolerant Deep Learning.” Master’s thesis. New York University Abu Dhabi, 2017.
[28]
Bachosz, T. “Paper and Digital Data Collection in New York: Challenges and Possible Solutions.” Master’s thesis. New York University Abu Dhabi, 2019.
[29]
Bhardwaj, A. et al. “Understanding Sudden Traffic Jams: From Emergence to Impact.” Development Engineering, Vol. 8, pp. 100105. 2023.
[30]
Chandy, K.M. et al. “Verification of Distributed Systems with Local-Global Predicates.” Formal Aspects of Computing, Vol. 23(5), pp. 649–679. Springer-Verlag, 2011.
[31]
White, J. “Applying Formal Methods to Distributed Algorithms Using Local-Global Relations.” PhD thesis. California Institute of Technology, 2011.
[32]
Pilotto, C. and White, J. “Towards a Verification Framework for Faulty Message Passing Systems in PVS.” Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering, Vol. 7(2), pp. 109–118. Springer-Verlag, 2011.
[33]
Pilotto, C. et al. “Consensus on Asynchronous Communication Networks in Presence of External Input.” Conference on Decision and Control. IEEE, 2010.
[34]
Pilotto, C. and White, J. “Verification of Faulty Message Passing Systems with Continuous State Space in PVS.” NASA Formal Methods Symposium. 2010.
[35]
Chandy, K.M. et al. “Towards Verified Distributed Software Through Refinement of Formal Archetypes.” Working Conference on Verified Software: Workshop on Experiments. IFIP, 2008.
[36]
Ţăpuş, C. et al. “A Mechanism for Sequential Consistency in a Distributed Objects System.” International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems. ISCA, 2004.
[37]
White, J. “Receive Buffer Dynamics and OS Scheduling.” Master’s thesis. California Institute of Technology, 2008.
[38]
White, J. and Wie, X. “Effect of Receive Buffer Size: An OS-Based Perspective.” International Workshop on Protocols for FAST Long-Distance Networks. 2007.
[39]
Castro, P. et al. “Before-Commit Client State Management Services for AJAX Applications.” Workshop on Hot Topics in Web Systems and Technologies (HotWeb). IEEE, 2006.
[40]
Black, J. et al. “Live Data Views: Programming Pervasive Applications That Use "Timely" and "Dynamic" Data.” International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM). ACM, 2005.
[41]
Bivens, A. et al. “Scalability and Performance of an Agent-Based Network Management Middleware.” International Journal of Network Management, Vol. 14(2), pp. 131–146. Wiley, 2004.