You may ask yourself how would I know him? You may ask yourself what does he do in his spare time? And you may ask yourself which languages does he know? And you may say to yourself I’d like to talk to this guy! Watching the days go by…
My name is Jacob Pawlak, I am a computational linguist, data engineer, and digital cowboy. Currently, I work for Apple as an English Computational Linguist. Recently I was promoted from the community to Moderator for the Tom Sachs Discord. I love building with Twitter data, sentiment analysis engines, and Python tool chains – my experiences usually combine them together. Web development is my second passion, from making fun and functional websites, to eCommerce shops. Even more recently I have taken to building sculptures as a hobby, sometimes alongside the Tom Sachs Studio. I am also venturing into NFTs with my first project The Ethereum Stamp Factory.
Check out some of my cool projects over here.
A few things I would like you to know about me
We could get into a list of my professional highlights, or I could list out all of my relevant classes from college – you can find that on my resume page. Let’s talk about a few things that I think are more interesting, like NLP and rally cars.
After my first year of college at the University of Kentucky, I wandered around the Summer Majors Fair, little did I know I was talking to my new faculty advisor, mentor, and professor. I jumped into the Intro to Linguistics, and a grad level Semantics and Pragmatic course – love at first sight! Fast forward a few bad chat bot attempts and Alexa Skills, I am still very passionate about NLP. Linguists are also prime data scientists too if you think about it! All we do is collect and analyze data, just like, variations in speech sounds instead of stock prices or brand impact.
Before I left UK I was able to get a job developing computer science curriculum, which gave me a way to stay up to date with the newish MERN stack. It also let me explore my passion for education – something that I deeply hope to get back to some day. I’ve worked as a web dev and software dev for a few places, but my ideal job would let me combine my passions for education, NLP, and data-driven tools. If it’s not that job, then f— it I want to be a rally car driver.
My love for cars has only grown with age, but rally racing has stuck with me, and if I didn’t work in tech that is what I would do. Maybe it was watching Austin Mini Coopers fly up the road to Monte Carlo, or maybe it was when I first heard that Subaru’s anti-lag, but I am forever hooked. Age old question: what would you do with a million dollars? Answer: house, savings, yada yada, rally car.
Recent Projects
Here are a few of my recently completed projects. For a more complete collection, take a look at my work
Some stuff that I like
I am not a photographer, I don’t take pictures all the time or even regularly, but here are some pictures that I like, and might help you understand some of the background to my life. Of course I have to pay internet tribute and post a picture of my cat, a meme (my personal music tastes), and a few pictures of my living space. It doesn’t mean much to most people, but I also have a few pictures of my most recent vacation to New York to see my favorite eSports team – Astralis. Counter Strike is one of my favorite games, and I would love to see another tournament soon. To the stars!
