Nicholas J. Adams-Cohen

I build ML systems that change how products work and how decisions get made.

Staff Data Scientist at Adobe. Previously Accenture, Stanford, Caltech.

What I Do

Personalization

Next-best-action models that drove 20% lift in feature adoption across thousands of users

Causal Inference

Measuring what works: A/B tests, natural experiments, and scalable experimentation platforms

Churn & Retention

Early warning systems that flag $16M+ in at-risk revenue for proactive intervention

ML for Policy

Refugee placement optimization presented to governments in 4 countries

Experience

Staff Data Scientist
Adobe • 2022–present
AI Research Scientist
Accenture • 2021–2022
Data Scientist
Stanford Immigration Policy Lab • 2019–2021
Project Lead
Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project • 2019–2021

Education

Ph.D., Computational Social Science
California Institute of Technology • 2019
M.S., Computational Social Science
California Institute of Technology • 2016
M.A., International Policy (Political Economy)
Stanford University • 2014
B.A., Political Science (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa)
UC Santa Barbara • 2011

Research

Misinformation Intervention & the 2020 Election MISDOOM '23

Synthetic controls show Twitter's content moderation reduced election misinfo flow by ~15%

Dynamic Social Media Monitoring SIGKDD '21

ML for tracking fast-moving online conversations—37% better at catching trends than static methods

Policy Change and Public Opinion Am. Politics Research '20

Diff-in-diff on Twitter data shows Supreme Court rulings polarize opinion in affected states

Finding Social Media Trolls NeurIPS '19

Word embeddings to auto-discover keywords for detecting online harassment

Leveraging the Power of Place Working paper

ML recommendations for where immigrants should settle—simulations show higher earnings