JW

Jay Wacker

Machine Learning Engineering Manager @ Apple | Natural Language Understanding · Menlo Park, California

Experience

Machine Learning Engineering Manager
Apple
Sep 2018 – Present
  • Grew and manage a team of 15 high-performing engineers building the natural language understanding system for Siri.
  • Operate a system handling billions of weekly requests with >98% user-facing accuracy across 5 years of continuous operation.
  • Shipped 60 product areas across more than 20 OS-aligned releases on 6 operating systems (iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, iPadOS).
  • Bridge machine learning, product development, and data quality management to deliver seamless and intelligent user experiences.
  • Published "Intelligent Assistant Language Understanding On-device" (arXiv:2308.03905).
Topic Ontology Architect
Quora
May 2014 – Aug 2018
  • Quora was a top-30 global website with 300M+ monthly unique visitors during tenure.
  • Led the ontology effort building systems to classify the world's knowledge, interfacing with ML systems to promote user-understandability at scale.
  • Lead question canonicalization, improved the Quora quality systems, developed the trending topics system, created the Top Question Writer program.
Assistant Professor
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory / Stanford University
Aug 2006 – May 2014
  • Performed research in theoretical high energy physics, running a group of postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates.
  • Taught at Stanford: Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, High Energy Collider Physics.
  • Organized the Simplified Models workshop at SLAC (2010), producing the field's most-cited search framework (946 citations).
  • Introduced the SIMP dark matter paradigm (691 citations), now recognized by the Particle Data Group as a standard mechanism.
  • Co-created the BOOST workshop series for jet substructure.
  • Lectured at the Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Caltech, UC Berkeley, Oxford, Fermilab, and CERN.
  • Participated in national fellowship selection committees (DOE) and reviewed grants for the NSF, DOE, and international agencies.
  • Won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Alfred P. Sloan Award, and the DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator Award.
Post-Doctoral Scholar
Stanford University
Aug 2003 – Aug 2006
  • Research in theoretical high energy physics, specializing in new models of electroweak symmetry breaking and translating those models into experimental signatures.
  • Published N-flation (707 citations) and the split supersymmetry phenomenology program.
  • Gave seminars at Harvard, MIT, BU, Fermilab, Cambridge, CERN, Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, NYU.
  • Mentored undergraduate and graduate students.
Graduate Researcher
University of California, Berkeley / Harvard University / Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
May 1998 – Aug 2003
  • Harvard University (2001–2003): Theoretical physics with Nima Arkani-Hamed. Instrumental in the proposal of Little Higgs theories (Minimal Moose: 799 citations). Presented at SUSY 2002, ICHEP 2002, Aspen Center for Physics.
  • LBNL Theory (1999–2001): Research with Nima Arkani-Hamed on extra dimension theories of flavor, split fermions, and supersymmetric theories of extra dimensions.
  • LBNL / CDF Experiment (1998–2000): Run II upgrade of the CDF detector under Young Kee Kim. Built and tested the Central Outer Tracker, debugged silicon detector read-out hybrids, contributed to SVX4 readout chip design.

Education

Ph.D., Physics
University of California, Berkeley
1998 – 2003
  • Advisor: Nima Arkani-Hamed
  • Research at LBNL (1998–2001) and Harvard University (2001–2003)
B.S., Physics
Iowa State University
1994 – 1998
  • Research with Kai-Ming Ho on computational materials science (silicon cluster structures, published in Nature)

Awards

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
The White House / Department of Energy
2010
  • Conferred by President Obama. Recognized for developing strategies to assist accelerators in searching for new particles at the highest energies.
Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
2010
DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator Award
Department of Energy, Office of High Energy Physics
2009
  • "Discovering Beyond the Standard Model Physics with Proton Colliders and Table Top Experiments"

Selected Publications

  • 64 publications, ~10,000 total citations across particle physics, cosmology, dark matter, and machine learning.
  • Simplified Models for LHC New Physics Searches — 946 citations. Became the standard framework for LHC searches.
  • The Minimal Moose for a Little Higgs — 799 citations. Foundational paper in the Little Higgs program.
  • N-flation — 707 citations. Multiple axions collectively driving inflation in string theory.
  • The SIMP Miracle — 691 citations. New paradigm for thermal relic dark matter via 3-to-2 annihilations.
  • Structures of Medium-Sized Silicon Clusters — 612 citations. Nature paper on silicon cluster geometries.
  • CDF Central Outer Tracker — 486 citations. Detector that enabled a decade of Tevatron physics.
  • See full list at /research organized by research program.