Contact Details
Sarah Sachs
(925) 787-5510
sarahmsachs@gmail.com
Sarah Sachs
(925) 787-5510
sarahmsachs@gmail.com
Software Engineer, Local Search• October 2016 - Present
Engineer working on location and geographically based search experiences. Currently focusing on dining and restaurant related verticals.
Sc.B. in Applied Math - Computer Science • Class of 2016
Awards and Recognition:
• University Distinguished Thesis Award: Honors thesis on Image Processing and Object Recognition was awarded the most prestigous honors thesis prize at Brown Univesity.
• Computer Science Department Senior Prize: Awarded to five of the department's top students for superior academic work and generous community leadership in the department.
Relevant Courses:
Independent Research in Computer Vision and Object Grammers with Prof. Pedro Felzenszwalb, Independent Study in Graph Theory with Prof. Caroline Klivans, Algorithmic Optimization Theory, Reinforcement Learning, Machine Learning, Data Science, Building Autonomous Robots, Advanced Computational Probability and Statistics, Systems Engineering, Differential Equations, Discrete Mathematics
Graduated Cum Laude • June 2012
I served as Student Council President in 2011-2012 and spent three years prior as class president. I served for two years as captain of the debate team.
Software Engineering Intern• June - August 2015
Intern for Google's Ground Truth team, responsible for building the Geo-Data platform that all Google maps and geo-products are built on top of. I used Google's location data to build a map-reduce pipeline that utilizes unsupervised clustering techniques to infer indoor floor plan features. I was the first engineer at Google to explore this new use of data. The results of my project led to new collaborations between various geo-data teams at Google.
Research Assistant • May - December 2015
Research assistant for Prof. Alexei Efros, working in close collaboration with Shiry Ginosar. I modified MIT’s LabelMe annotation tool to enhance Mechanical Turk annotation compatibility. I created a dataset of 96,000 diverse yearbook photos and ensured a statistically representative distribution of teenagers in the United States. For more information on the paper we wrote, see publications.
Comfort level scored on a scale of low familiarity to high proficiency.
S. Ginosar, K. Rakelly, S. Sachs, B. Yin and A. Efros• ICCV 2015 Extreme Imaging Workshop
Paper abstract:
Many details about our world are not captured in written records because they are too mundane or too abstract to describe in words. Fortunately, since the invention of the camera, an ever-increasing number of photographs capture much of this otherwise lost information. This plethora of artifacts documenting our "visual culture" is a treasure trove of knowledge as yet untapped by historians. We present a dataset of 37,921 frontal-facing American high school yearbook photos that allow us to use computation to glimpse into the historical visual record too voluminous to be evaluated manually. The collected portraits provide a constant visual frame of reference with varying content. We can therefore use them to consider issues such as a decade's defining style elements, or trends in fashion and social norms over time. We demonstrate that our historical image dataset may be used together with weakly-supervised data-driven techniques to perform scalable historical analysis of large image corpora with minimal human effort, much in the same way that large text corpora together with natural language processing revolutionized historians' workflow. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of our dataset in dating grayscale portraits using deep learning methods.
Selected Press Coverage
Organization Coordinator• 2014-2016
I coordinated the departmental group for Brown Women in Computer Science. Representing WICS, I attended faculty meetings and met with Diversity Committee faculty to improve the experience of women and under-represented racial minorities in the department. I also assisted in providing student perspectives on new faculty hires. I coordinated events and mixers for women in our department. I have sat on various panels throughout the university about minorities in STEM and starting CS late. I formerly served as the Mentorship Coordinator, in which I nearly doubled the particpation rate.
Voted "Best of the Best" TAs in Brown Computer Science• Spring 2015
Nominated by students and fellow TAs. Awarded during a departmental end-of-year ceremony. One of five recieptients out of over 200 TAs in the department. Sample of nomination text below:
Sarah has been enthusiastic, unconditionally kind, thoughtful, and incredibly motivating to me throughout my time in CS16. While many of the CS16 TAs are excellent, I feel that Sarah has a much better ability than most to understand issues that students face (both academic and otherwise), from the student's perspective. Essentially, I feel her abilities as a TA and qualities as a person do not deserve to go unacknowledged by the department.
Sarah is an absolutely fantastic TA! She brings incredible enthusiasm and kindness that makes her a delight to work with as a fellow TA and an amazing resource for students.
CS16 - Data Structures and Algorithms • Head TA • Spring 2016
HTA'd for Prof. David Laidlaw. Hired a staff of over 25 UTA's and crafted a syllabus and curriculum for one of the Brown's largest intro-sequence classes. Coordinating staff orientation and weekly grading meetings. Responsible for efficient automatic grading processes and staff schedules. Integrated a new approach of "Active Learning" into bi-weekly lectures and sections.
CS142 - Machine Learning• Undergraduate TA • Fall 2015
TA'd for Prof. Erik Sudderth. I lead weekly office hours, create homework problems, and do weekly gradings. Topics covered include: Gaussian Processes, Bayesian Inference, Nueral Networks, Mixture Models, and Logistic Regression.
CS16 - Data Structures and Algorithms• Undergraduate TA • Spring 2015
TA'd for Prof. David Laidlaw. I led weekly sections to review course material and weekly clinics to encourage group participation. I also created multiple large scale python testing scripts to efficiently grade student homeworks.
CS15 - Object Oriented Programming• Undergraduate TA • Fall 2014
TA'd for Prof. Andy Van Dam. I held four hours of weekly one-on-one debugging sessions of large scale Java programs with over 1000 lines of code.
Staff Writer • 2012-2014
My beat was campus planning and faculty accomplishments in Science and Research. New York Magazine featured my work on economics concentrators’ career aspirations in May, 2013. After my time as a writer, I organized and analyzed the biannual “Herald Poll”, which collects public opinion data from the student body.
Interviews Board• 2013-2014
I interviewed professors and relevant political thinkers on current events. Fox News, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and International Business Times all featured video coverage I produced of protests on University campus. I also published weekly podcasts of professor interviews.
Palo Alto, CA. On a 2-1 decision, I defeated Loyola BO (Bob Overing) in the final round to win the championship. The tournament had over 180 debaters in the pool.
Dallas, TX. I won first place out of a pool of 99. The final round was a 4-1 decision again Cypress Falls High School's Brian Hodge.
Dallas, TX. In an elite invitation only round robin exhibition of the top female debaters in the country, I won the final round on a 3-2 decision.
Berkeley, CA. Won second place in the largest national circuit tournament in California.
Las Vegas, NV. Second Place. Invitation only year-end championship.
Founder and Director • 2013-2014
I created dance fitness class focused on empowering women through movement. All proceeds were donated to various charities that promoted women's health and gender equality. I personally managed finance, publicity, scheduling, and operations. I directed a team of eight instructors and 150 attendees.
Check out this video promoting our organization:
Mentor guide • 2013-Present
I love giving tours of Brown and have been volunteering with the Admissions office since my sophomore year. I am now also a mentor guide who manages a team of tour guides and trains new guides.
