Jacob A. Rose

Jacob(at)JacobARose.com

Suffern, NY

I am the Technology and Digital Pedagogy Coordinator at the NYU Institute of Human Development and Social Change, where I support the NYU Prison Education Program’s work to close the digital literacy divide in college-in-prison education.

The work runs along two tracks. On the infrastructure side, I assess and document the technology that incarcerated students actually have access to — offline intranet systems, computer lab hardware, digital learning platforms, library technologies, and security-approved research tools — and identify the gaps that keep academic materials out of reach. On the pedagogical side, I co-design surveys, focus groups, and infrastructural assessments with students and faculty to understand how digital literacy, research strategy, and teaching practice work inside a college-in-prison context, and I build a programmatic knowledge base of approved technologies and offline research resources that people can genuinely use. I partner with the NYU Division of Libraries, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), and peer college-in-prison providers on strategic planning and shared resource development, and I develop resources for both currently incarcerated students and formerly incarcerated students continuing their education after release.

Before this, I completed my MSc in Electrical Sciences & Computer Engineering at Brown University, where I was supervised first by Professor Chris Rose and then by Professor Thomas Serre. Earlier, I completed my BSc in Physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Before starting graduate school at Brown, I worked on developing data engineering best practices and computer vision models for agricultural research at Terramera Inc in Vancouver, BC.

news

Sep 01, 2026	Joined the NYU Institute of Human Development and Social Change as Technology and Digital Pedagogy Coordinator, supporting the NYU Prison Education Program’s work to close the digital literacy divide in college-in-prison education.
Feb 12, 2023	Awarded a Master of Science in Electrical Sciences & Computer Engineering from Brown University’s School of Engineering
Sep 01, 2017	Enrolled as a PhD student in Electrical Sciences & Computer Engineering at Brown University, simultaneously beginning work as a Research Assistant under Professor Chris Rose working on developing a system of digital communication using chemicals transmitted through the air and received by sensors at the end of a wind tunnel.
Feb 01, 2016	Awarded a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

latest posts

selected publications

An image dataset of cleared, x-rayed, and fossil leaves vetted to plant family for human and machine learning

Peter Wilf, Scott L. Wing, Herbert W. Meyer, Jacob A. Rose, and 13 more authors

PhytoKeys, Dec 2021

Publisher: Pensoft Publishers

Abs DOI

Leaves are the most abundant and visible plant organ, both in the modern world and the fossil record. Identifying foliage to the correct plant family based on leaf architecture is a fundamental botanical skill that is also critical for isolated fossil leaves, which often, especially in the Cenozoic, represent extinct genera and species from extant families. Resources focused on leaf identification are remarkably scarce; however, the situation has improved due to the recent proliferation of digitized herbarium material, live-plant identification applications, and online collections of cleared and fossil leaf images. Nevertheless, the need remains for a specialized image dataset for comparative leaf architecture. We address this gap by assembling an open-access database of 30,252 images of vouchered leaf specimens vetted to family level, primarily of angiosperms, including 26,176 images of cleared and x-rayed leaves representing 354 families and 4,076 of fossil leaves from 48 families. The images maintain original resolution, have user-friendly filenames, and are vetted using APG and modern paleobotanical standards. The cleared and x-rayed leaves include the Jack A. Wolfe and Leo J. Hickey contributions to the National Cleared Leaf Collection and a collection of high-resolution scanned x-ray negatives, housed in the Division of Paleobotany, Department of Paleobiology, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C.; and the Daniel I. Axelrod Cleared Leaf Collection, housed at the University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley. The fossil images include a sampling of Late Cretaceous to Eocene paleobotanical sites from the Western Hemisphere held at numerous institutions, especially from Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument (late Eocene, Colorado), as well as several other localities from the Late Cretaceous to Eocene of the Western USA and the early Paleogene of Colombia and southern Argentina. The dataset facilitates new research and education opportunities in paleobotany, comparative leaf architecture, systematics, and machine learning.