Lynette Shaw

About Lynette Shaw

I am a Data Scientist with specializations in applied social statistics, NLP, machine-learning, and the application of GAI/LLMs to build business solutions. I was also a Founding Board Member of The Computational Democracy Project, a non-profit which stewards the open source platform, Polis, and supports its usage in democratic deliberative processes across the world. I hold a PhD from the University of Washington in Sociology with a concentration in Social Statistics. Previously, I was a Fellow and Assistant Professor of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan where I researched the origins of Bitcoin\'s economic value in online communities and used computational modeling to investigate the emergence of cultural dynamics from individual cognitive processing.

Experience

1. Lead Data Scientist

   Knowable

   Mar 2023 — Present

   Acting as lead technical manager for company’s data science team; responsible for collaborating with wider Product team to establish, execute, and evaluate data science projectsPrimary focus on applying LLM prompt engineering methods and tool development to leverage structured data towards the end of enhancing RAG capabilities and building highly reliable, low-friction GAI products that support user search and interpretation of large contract document populations (~10K - 100K documents)Built automated system for identifying near duplicates in large contract document populations characterized by high proportions of templates Developed new supervised ML models for contract content predictions and deployment systems using AWS Sagemaker endpoints and custom Docker containers

Education

• University of Washington

  Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Sociology

• University of Washington

  Master of Arts (MA), Sociology

  2008 — 2011

• The University of Texas at Austin

  Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Physics, Sociology

  2001 — 2005

Skills

• Community Outreach
• Quantitative Research
• Curriculum Development
• University Teaching
• Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Writing
• Agent-Based Modeling
• Reporting & Analysis
• Multivariate Statistics