Hello there!

Welcome to my blog! My name is Jake (Jaesung) Tae, and I’m a senior at Yale University working towards a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics.

My interests are diverse, but I am particularly fascinated by text-to-speech, NLP, generative modeling, and recommendation systems. While I’m a skeptic who believes that artificial intelligence will not achieve human-level understanding of emotion or empathy, I strongly believe that the development and application of deep learning models will transform the world for the better. I’ll also stick in here the fact that I’m a proud Pythonista and a firm advocate of open sourcing (GitHub).

My most transformative event in life was the time in the Korean military, where I worked as a translator at the 142nd Military Policy Company, 8th U.S. Army. My primary responsibilities included responding to emergency calls, maintaining real-time communication with patrols and the Korean National Police, and overseeing law enforcement at U.S. Army Garrison-Yongsan, Seoul. I am proud to have played my part as a member of the Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army.

In my free time, I love watching soccer (the real football–a hot take, I know. But I’ve been in the Yale Precision Marching Band so my love for football is also there), playing the guitar (acoustic finger style, to be exact), eating my way through hole in the wall restaurants (the dingy, small ones are often better than the huge, fancy ones), and writing long sentences full of commas and parentheses. I’m also interested in consumer tech, although I’m still rocking my 10-year-old AMD-powered Samsung desktop running Windows 7 at home. Yes, I used AMD way before it became cool.

This blog is intended as a diary of sorts, a repository where I keep various records of my life, display projects I dabble in for fun, and write about the large and small, significant and the insignificant out of arbitrary whim. When I study on my own, I tend to go down many rabbit holes, so I hope you can bear with the ostensibly random selection of topics on my blog. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing!