Jack Baker

About Jack Baker

I specialize in connecting advanced scientific modeling approaches to real-world business…

Experience

1. Director, Analytic Solutions - Sr Scientist

   Farmers Insurance

   Jun 2021 — Present

   Functioning as Senior Scientist, I lead a 15-member cross-functional team focused on Automation and Operational RnD. Following agile methodologies and within an over-arching MLOps framework, we develop and deploy comprehensive automation architectures. These meld machine learning and other algorithm deployments with comprehensive monitoring, scenario-based forecasting, and simulation capabilities to develop complete solutions for operational task-replacement and associated R&D. My duties involve overall team leadership, mentoring, strategy development, operational planning and tracking, and C-suite communications. As a hands-on leader, I also make significant scientific SME contributions in the following areas:(1) development of ML models (xgboost, light gbm, MARS, random forests, elastic nets, statistical clustering),(2) applied statistics and demography,(linear and generalized linear models, including hierarchical models, demographic analysis and projections including mortality models, time-series modeling & forecasting, survival analysis (proportional hazards, AFT),(3) operational R&D (decision trees & probabilistic risk and decision analysis, system dynamics, computational simulation, optimization, queueing models),(4) deep-dive R&D focused on insights analysis, ongoing risk monitoring, ML model evaluations, and monitoring of bias & potential proxy discrimination in ML and other algorithmic models, and (5) behavioral science & epidemiologic research. Software utilized on a day-to-day basis comprise a modern tech-stack including:(1) scripting languages & associated IDEs: R (Rstudio, Posit Cloud), Python (Jupyter Labs, AWS Sagemaker, Sagemaker Studio),(2) GitHub for collaboration and documentation,(3) AWS for model deployment,(3) Dremio for universal data access and management using SQL,(4) mapping & GIS systems including QGIS, Arc-GIS Explorer, and Google Earth Pro, and (5) PowerBI & Markdown reports for monitoring purposes.

Education

• The University of New Mexico

  M.S., Anthropology

  2000 — 2002

• The University of New Mexico

  Ph.D., Anthropology

  2002 — 2007

• University of North Dakota

  B.A., Anthropology

  1998 — 2000

Skills

• Geographic Information Systems (Gis)
• Analytics
• Public Speaking
• University Teaching
• Program Management
• Agent-Based Modeling
• Sd and Dynamic Population Models
• Languages: Spanish and Portuguese.
• Gis
• Stochastic Simulation
• Quantitative Research
• Statistical Modeling
• Research Design
• Qualitative Research
• Strategic and Operational Management
• Operations and Process Management
• Research Design and Quantitative/Statistical Analysis
• Statistics
• Strategy
• Data Analysis
• Survey Research
• Proposal Writing
• Probabilistic Risk and Decision Analysis
• Sas Programming
• Demographic Analysis
• Research
• R
• Spss
• Software: R, Vensim, Aimms, Arc-Gis, Mapwindow, Satscan, Spss, Minitab, Sas.