Jordan Harrod (born July 10, 1996) is an American research scientist and

YouTuber A YouTuber is an online personality and/or influencer who produces videos on the video-sharing platform YouTube, typically posting to their personal YouTube channel. The term was first used in the English language in 2006. Influence Influe ...

who works on

neuroengineering Neural engineering (also known as neuroengineering) is a discipline within biomedical engineering that uses engineering techniques to understand, repair, replace, or enhance neural systems. Neural engineers are uniquely qualified to solve design ...

, brain-machine interfaces, and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

for medicine. A current graduate student at Harvard and

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

, Harrod also runs a

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

channel to educate the public about artificial intelligence. As of January 2023, her YouTube channel has over 82.5 thousand subscribers and her videos have over 1.8 million total views.

Early life and education

Harrod is from

Montclair, New Jersey Montclair () is a township in Essex County in the U.S. state of New Jersey. Situated on the cliffs of the Watchung Mountains, Montclair is a wealthy and diverse commuter town and suburb of New York City within the New York metropolitan area. ...

, where she attended Montclair High School, graduating in 2014. During high school, she was a member of the varsity

fencing Fencing is a group of three related combat sports. The three disciplines in modern fencing are the foil, the épée, and the sabre (also ''saber''); winning points are made through the weapon's contact with an opponent. A fourth discipline, ...

and

tennis Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a single opponent ( singles) or between two teams of two players each ( doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball ...

teams. Harrod graduated from

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

in 2018 with a

B.S. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University ...

Biomedical Engineering Biomedical engineering (BME) or medical engineering is the application of engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology for healthcare purposes (e.g., diagnostic or therapeutic). BME is also traditionally logical sciences ...

. During her undergraduate years, she spent one summer doing machine learning research for

MRI Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to form pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes of the body. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields, magnetic field gradients, and radio waves ...

reconstruction at Stanford University. She is currently a Ph.D. student and

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party *National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political gr ...

Graduate Research Fellow in Harvard-

's Health Sciences and Technology program, where she studies using neuromodulation to understand pain and consciousness, and using neurotechnology and machine learning to develop new tools for brain stimulation. She primarily collaborates with anesthesiologist

Emery Brown Emery Neal Brown (born 1957) is an American statistician, neuroscientist, and anesthesiologist. He is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a practicing anesthesio ...

and neuroscientist

Ed Boyden Edward S. Boyden is an American neuroscientist at MIT. He is the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, a faculty member in the MIT Media Lab and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. In 2018 he was named a Howard Hu ...

. Harrod has been an invited public speaker at TEDxBeaconStreet, the WITI Women in Technology Summit, and Women Who Code

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

. Her TEDx talk discussed the importance of AI literacy. In 2020, she was featured by Built In as one of nine Black women in data science to know.

YouTube career

Harrod's

channel centers around topics and current events in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

, AI ethics, and medical technology. She started her YouTube channel because she wasn't able to find a lot of educational resources that were geared towards the average person on how people interact with algorithms. Her most-watched video examines how AI proctors work and whether they can detect online exam cheating. She is part of the Inquisitive Fellowship, an investment by

Vsauce Vsauce () is a YouTube brand created by educator Michael Stevens. The channels feature videos on scientific, psychological, mathematical, and philosophical topics, as well as gaming, technology, popular culture, and other general interest subj ...

in educational creators on YouTube. In August 2020,

AsapSCIENCE AsapScience, stylized as AsapSCIENCE, is a YouTube channel created by Canadian YouTubers Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown. The channel produces weekly videos that touch on many different topics of science. AsapScience is one of the largest ed ...

mentioned Harrod's channel in a video discussing diversity in science. Popular YouTuber Tom Scott challenged Harrod to create a

deepfake Deepfakes (a portmanteau of " deep learning" and "fake") are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerfu ...

version of him on a budget of mere $100. In a collaboration video on his channel, Harrod succeeded to do so and also discussed the tech and dangers associated with deepfakes. In October 2020, Harrod joined creator community Standard and started posting her videos to Nebula, a subscription-based video sharing platform, due to YouTube's strict algorithms. "There are definitely topics that I've come across that I think would be challenging to cover on YouTube," she explained to BBC. For example, if she created a video on how algorithms moderate hate speech online, YouTube's algorithms may flag that video's content as hate speech.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Harrod, Jordan 1996 births Living people American YouTubers Cornell University alumni Montclair High School (New Jersey) alumni People from Montclair, New Jersey