Zaria Jalan

Masters candidate

Zaria is a Master’s candidate in CCC passionate about building a digital landscape where meaningful connections flourish and drive positive systemic change. Her research focuses on applying novel NLP methods to enhance people’s abilities to understand each other and support democratic processes. Her research interests include retrieval augmented generation, depolarization of content recommendation algorithms, and decentralized distributed access to AI. She was previously a Senior Software Engineer at Google Jigsaw, where she built AI models that detect prosocial signals in online comment sections via the Perspective API. Also at Google, she co-developed police de-escalation virtual reality scenarios, leveraging AI to improve dialogue between police officers and civilians. Zaria received a Bachelor of Statistics, Machine Learning & Art from Carnegie Mellon University. Her undergraduate capstone, awarded a National Endowment of the Humanities grant, used computer vision algorithms to curate The Teenie Harris Archive for the Carnegie Museum of Art. She likes yoga, art, lifting weights, and exploring new restaurants.