yassogba@gmail.com

Education

2007-2009   MIT Media Lab   Cambridge, MA

S.M. Media Arts & Sciences

2003-2006   Concordia University    Montreal, QC

B.Sc. Computer Science, with Hons. Minor in Digital Image/Sound and the Fine Arts.


Experience

2023-Current   Senior Research Scientist, Apple AI/ML   Cambridge, MA

Research and engineering at the intersection of machine learning, visualization and HCI.

2018-2022   Senior Software Engineer, People + AI Research, Google Brain   Cambridge, MA

Research and engineering at the intersection of machine learning, visualization and HCI.

Early contributor to TensorFlow.js, the leading deep learning library for the web. Joined the project before it became part of the TensorFlow ecosystem, and eventually led development of the tf.js 3.0 release. Led development of tfjs-vis, a companion library for visualization of in-browser training dynamics and model behavior as well as tfjs-react-native.

Co-created a podcast, Tic-Tac-Toe the Hard Way, to introduce non-experts to the nuts and bolts of deep learning.

After tfjs my research focused on visualization for generative model evaluation, human-in-the-loop RL and intepratability for multi-agent RL systems.

2013-2017   Senior Data Visualization Engineer, Bocoup   Boston, MA

Design and development of custom web-based data visualizations using open source technologies.

Founding member of the data visualization team at Bocoup. Worked on a wide variety of client and internal projects at Bocoup, both as a team lead and individual contributor. Responsibilities included: client relationship management, technical project planning, user and stakeholder interviews, visualization design and prototyping and implementation of data-driven web applications.

Published blog posts on visualization topics and developed classes and workshop materials for in-person delivery including: Introduction to D3, Text Analysis and Visualization as well as an Art & Code Workshop developed to introduce high school girls to computational creativity.

2009-2013   Research Developer, Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research   Cambridge, MA

Research and development of novel information visualization systems for external and internal audiences.

Designed, developed and deployed Many Bills, a publicly accessible web-based visualization of congressional legislation. This work has been published at CHI and SIGIR, and the project was also a 2011 Webby Awards Honoree.

Developed event sequence/timeline visualizations that graduated into an IBM-Cognos product.

Mentored two graduate student interns.

2007-2009   Graduate Research Assistant, Sociable Media group, MIT Media lab   Cambridge, MA

Research on visualization in socio-technical systems to support communication and collaboration.

Built and launched a visual microblogging site that allowed people to document their everyday data and create statistical graphs of their lives using a simple Twitter-like text interface.

For my thesis work I created a novel programming environment to encourage collaboration between distributed programmers within communities of practice by tracking and visualizing the movement of code within the community with very fine granularity.

Gave numerous presentations to sponsors in both small and large groups.

2005-2007   Software Developer, Obx labs, Concordia university    Montreal, QC

Development of Java-based NextText and TextEngine libraries for dynamic typography and computer-vision-based integration with real time human performance.

Designed and implemented installation and performance art pieces. Led a team of three developers during my last six months there.


Selected Publications

Large scale qualitative evaluation of generative image model outputs.
Yannick Assogba, Adam Pearce, Madison Elliott. (Arxix) 2022.

Beyond rewards: a hierarchical perspective on offline multiagent behavioral analysis.
Shayegan Omidshafiei, Andrei Kapishnikov, Yannick Assogba, Lucas Dixon, Been Kim. Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022.

TensorFlow.js: Machine Learning for the Web and Beyond.
Daniel Smilkov, Nikhil Thorat, Yannick Assogba, Ann Yuan, Nick Kreeger, Ping Yu, Kangyi Zhang, Shanqing Cai, Eric Nielsen, David Soergel, Stan Bileschi, Michael Terry, Charles Nicholson, Sandeep N. Gupta, Sarah Sirajuddin, D Sculley, Rajat Monga, Greg Corrado, Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg. Proceedings of Machine Learning and Systems (SysML) 2019.

Many Bills: Engaging Citizens through Visualizations of Congressional legislation.
Yannick Assogba, Irene Ros, Joan DiMicco, Matt McKeon. ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2011.

Detecting Outlier Sections in US Congressional Legislation.
Elif Aktolga, Irene Ros, Yannick Assogba Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2011.

Share: A Programming Environment for Loosely Bound Cooperation.
Yannick Assogba, Judith Donath. ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2010.

Mycrocosm: Visual Microblogging.
Yannick Assogba, Judith Donath. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICCS) 2009.

Taking Sides: Dynamic Text and Hip-Hop.
Yannick Assogba, Jason Lewis. ACM International Conference on Multimedia, 2006


Skills

Current: Javascript/Typescript, Python, HTML/CSS, git, Sketch, Adobe Illustrator
Past: Ruby, Java, C, C++

Community

OpenVis Conf: I served on the OpenVis Conf program committee from the inception of the conference (2013-2018). I also administered the diversity scholarship program.