Evan Jones is a full-stack software engineer and data scientist at the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security, a University-Affiliated Research Center of the United States Department of Defense supporting the Intelligence Community. As of this writing, he works in support of the Cognitive Security mission area. He leads development of Discovery, a social media simulator and experimentation platform used for studying online mis/disinformation which he started developing as a RISC intern, and the Social Science Data Hub, an ATAC-funded hub for indexing and open-sourcing social science data sets funded by the DoD.
Prior to joining ARLIS as Faculty Specialist, he was a PhD student in Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park studying the economic and media dimensions of China’s growing influence in Africa and reactions to them by states and individuals. In addition to his research, he co-chaired the department's Graduate Student Methods Workshop for multiple years; worked for Professors David and Kathleen Cunninham (PIs) to modernize data collection, curation, and storage on two NSF-funded projects studying rebel group behavior; and was affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Computational Social Science Lab. In 2022, he decided to leave his PhD program early to focus full-time on software engineering, machine learning and data science -- his true passions.
Designed, developed, and open-sourced a semi-parametric, multidimensional Bayesian factor analysis for multimodal data (https://rdrr.io/github/EandrewJones/mmBPFA/) (2021)