Devon Brackbill
About me
I earned my PhD from UPenn, where I was a member of the Network Dynamics Group. My academic research in Computational Social Science has been published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLOS ONE, and elsewhere. See academic research for more details.Current work
- Data Science at Amazon Robotics. I am currently a data scientist at Amazon Robotics. I'm working on improving robotic fulfillment and transportation buildings, all toward the goal of optimizing a logistics network that handles billions of items each year.
- LP. I am a limited partner in funds focused on software (typically SaaS) and artificial intelligence. For inquiries here, my email address is < first-name >.< last-name >[at] gmail [dot] com.
Previous work
- Instagram content moderation. As a data scientist at Instagram, I worked on content moderation, including the measurement and automated removal of objectionable content that violates FB's community standards. The problems in this space lie at the intersection of free speech and creating safe online communities.
- Health care. Before that, I was a data scientist for a hospital working on population health. Our goal was to manage patient care to prevent them becoming sicker and incurring more expensive and intensive care. I built predictive models to forecast all-cause inpatient readmission risk and other events to reduce unnecessary patient care. build predictive models so that we could manage a panel of patients. Our goal was to manage patient worked at a hospital building predictive models for population health management.
Research
My academic research sits at the intersection of the social sciences, physics, and computer science. I am interested in how individual actions give rise to collective phenomena in large populations. Applications include the complex interplay of social forces that produce collective intelligence, group problem-solving, consensus formation, and social norms in human social systems.To understand the dynamics of complex systems, I rely on agent-based models to gain theoretical traction on a social behavior. Then, I test these ideas using online experiments to see if these theories hold true.
See the Academic Research section for more information.
