Current Status
About Me

I'm a third-year student studying a Bachelor's of Science degree in Computer Science and Philosophy with a Minor in Mathematics at Northeastern University Khoury College of Computer Sciences. My journey so far has been about honing my technical skills in computer science to create meaningful social impact through thoughtful engineering. My academic history has been a messy conglomeration of competitive mathematics, deep dives into tech, law & media and tinkering around a range of passion projects. These experiences have shaped my core passion: building technology that guides and empowers people to intuitively make better decisions and live good lives. I conduct research in fostering virtues online, nudging techniques, and human-centric design at the Plural Connections Group. Outside of my life in tech, I've enjoy teaching underclassmen Algorithms & Data Structures as the Director of Tech Consulting at TAMID, taking too long to finish the Dune series, and spending time in the great outdoors via hiking and snowboarding.

My early education was founded on the principle that math was everything. Ever since I was young, I participated (poorly) in competitive math teams, went to Idea Math Camp, and then much later, a six-week intensive summer studies at Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, where I really began to appreciate the quirks and scope of the field. I took my interests into computer science, where I enjoyed the marriage of theoretical thinking and practical application. In 2020, I was accepted into the MIT PRIMES's Computer Science Research track where I worked with Jules Drean, a graduate student at MIT CSAIL, on a project called Non-Fungible Objects (NFO): Hard-to-Counterfeit Virtual Assets Based On Trusted-Hardware. I joined Northeastern in 2022 where I expanded my knowledge about computer science into the world of full stack web development and AI at the TAMID Group on campus and at Samsung AI. I soon became obsessed with computer science as it became the medium for both my quantitative and creative expression. During the same year, I read Superintelligence: Risks, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom and became enraptured by tech, ethics, and society. My activities during 2023 reflected all my interests: I strengthened my technical literacy at a Software Engineering Internship at Ampion, PBC and worked with Professor Patterson at the Northeastern University to work on his code synthesizer research project combating automation bias, and bringing AI into programming languages. In 2024, I started working at the Plural Connections Group as a Research Engineer Co-op on their Intellectual Humility initiative and led TAMID as their Executive Vice President. All in all, my work isn’t just about writing code—it’s about exploring how technology shapes the way we think, interact, and solve problems. And that’s what keeps me excited for what’s next.

Explore Me

Rachel Chen
Mail: rachel.j.chen@gmail.com
GitHub: github.com/RachelJiarui LinkedIn: linkedIn.com/racheljiarui
Phone Number: (617)-438-9641

Professional Experience

08/19/24
12/31/24

Research Engineer @ Plural Connections Group

Working at Northeastern University under Professor Nabeel Gillani at lab aimed to increase pluralism through education and restructuring social media. Tasked as the principle engineer to create interventions to increase intellectual humility online. Using React, Flask, MongoDB to build web app that mimics the Reddit-platform. Deployed on AWS EC2 Instance using Gunicorn and Nginx. User tested and pending launch to hundreds of research participants.

05/20/24
08/16/24

Software Engineering Intern @ UKG

Worked at Lowell HQ as a Software Engineering Intern on Cloud Observability and Realiability Tooling team. Built autonomations to resolve daily memory alerts and contructed new Grafana Cloud dashboards to help migration from on-prem services to cloud. Leveraged cloud observability tools like Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform, ELK stack, Grafana, InfluxDB, Splunk, Datadog, and Cronjobs in tickets.

05/15/23
8/25/23

Software Engineering Intern @ Ampion

Worked on the Subscriber Experience team to conduct full rehaul and modernization of main website. Optimized SEOs and connected website code to Content Management System (DatoCMS). Performed data analysis on customer issues on Salesforce and website analytics from Google Analytics, presenting findings to team and executive management.

05/15/23
07/01/23

Multivariable Calculus Teacher Assistant

Graded weekly quizzes for over 60 students and provided solution manual feedback for Professor Seo.

Leadership Roles

01/01/25
05/01/25

Director of Tech Consulting of TAMID

Scoped project for 6 developers and teach weekly lessons in algorithms and technical interview preparation to peers.

05/01/24
12/31/24

Executive Vice President of TAMID

Oversaw operations for 150+ member club, led 13 executive leaders and 7 committees to drive strategic initiatives in recruitment, finances, social and professional engagement.

12/01/23
05/01/24

VP of Operations & Finance of TAMID

Standardizing processes for the back-end logistics of TAMID Consulting Club and building out a Recruitment dashboard on Notion using automations.

07/01/23
12/01/23

Tech Consulting Foundations Instructor of TAMID

Educated a weekly class of 13 students on web development fundamentals: Git/Version Control, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, and APIs. Included 3-part homework of varying difficulties.

Research

01/01/25
05/01/25

Research Assistant at Plural Connections Group

Same desc. as Research Engineer position at Plural Connections Group under Professional Experience.

05/01/23
12/31/24

Research Assistant to Professor Daniel Patterson

Proposing an environment to prevent automation bias for integrated human-AI optimized Python programming leveraging ChatGPT API. Built prototype and deployed it to be used by 50 students in a lab. Submitted paper to The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming journal.

01/01/24
05/11/24

Human Autonomy in Digital Social Networks and Recommender Systems

Independent research project advised by Professor Patterson exploring autonomy, a new framework for defining of autonomy, and applying it to social media platforms that use recommender systems. Created and presented poster at RISE Undergraduate Conference Presentation on April 11th, 2024.

01/01/21
07/27/22

Computer Science Researcher at MIT CSAIL

Invented research paper on secure hardware to ensure digital ownership on virtual objects using crytopgrahy. Specified 3 security mechanisms to unwanted side-channels and logic using cryptographic protocols analysis.

Written Work

11/17/23
12/08/23

Erosion of Autonomy in Algorithmic Recommendation Systems

A dissection of the erosion of autonomy in algorithmic recommendation systems, how they are incompatible, and state an urgency of legal action.

10/23/23
11/08/23

Free Speech is a Triangle Literature Review

A summary of the Jack Balkin piece "Free Speech is a Triangle," where I propose a technological solution of using decentralized social platforms to safeguard users' freedom of speech against what he deemed "new-speech regulation" harms.

Deeper Look into Technical Projects

09/01/2024
012/19/2024

Social Cues Intervention on Reddit-Like Platform @ Plural Connections Group

Deployed and developed full-stack app on AWS mimicking Reddit to test hypothesis on use of social cues to increase intellectual humility in online discussions on U.S. politics. Used React, Flask, AWS EC2, and MongoDB for web development, and worked closely with Dartmouth NLP Group to develop and fine-tune an intellectual humility classifier on political speech. Worked on k-shot learning and prompt engineering ChatGPT to improve classification and the intervention.

05/01/2024
08/30/2024

Truth Agent @ Google Gemini Developer Competition

Pioneering browser extention AI system to foster critical thinking skills by measuring real-time online misinformation on the page. Submitted to Google Gemini Developer Competition, pending results.

GitHub link to Truth Agent

03/29/2024
03/30/2024

EduFlex @ NU AI Hackathon

1st Place Winner. Empowering public free online computer science education to lower the barrier of entry for low-income students who don’t have access to prestigious university resources using NLP.

GitHub link to EduFlex

03/01/2024
04/10/2024

Tripartite Soul AI

Diagnosis your tripartite soul and speak with Plato to make your soul most just. Uses Plato's Republic and his dialogues.

GitHub link to Tripartite Soul AI

10/01/2023
11/10/2023

Hexagonal Othello Game

Built the game Othello on a hexagonal board using Java and Java Swing. Used model-view-controller and adapter object-oriented design pattern.

GitHub link to Othello

05/01/23
Present

Synth Research

Created prototype which queries python code from ChatGPT to match function specification. Wrote testing system which requeries ChatGPT with error messages with faulty implementations. Deployed Blackjack Game lab for 50 students to use to test the prototype and provide feedback on their experience.

05/15/23
07/01/23

Ampion Web App Reconfiguration

Worked closely with marketing and design teams to implement design of new modern website navigation bar. Improved internal system operations by connecting webpages to DatoCMS, Content Management System. Configured URLs, landing pages, metadata based on best Search Engine Optimization practices.

01/01/2020
07/27/2022

Non-Fungible Objects (NFO): Hard-to-Counterfeit Virtual Assets Based On Trusted-Hardware

Research that introduces a new technology for virtual assets by securely tying their initialization, development and exchange to our secure hardware. We assert that our version of virtual ownership is stronger than Non-Fungible Tokens' (NFT) version.

LinkedIn link to view paper

04/20/23
05/01/23

High Resolution Image Cropping

Tool to crop images without losing resolution. Used optimized graph traversal techniques and object-oriented design principles to remove seams of the least important pixels on an image, preventing loss of resolution quality of the image when cropping.

02/01/2023
05/15/2023

Multilingual Speech Generation

Lowers the language barrier by enabling personalized conversation, which can provide speakers of other languages better access to fair education, employment, public services, and medical attention. Achieved 83% speech identification accuracy using a KNN model and through researching zero-shot generation.