Jacob Tjaden

Research

I am a first-year PhD student at Columbia in the ARiSE Lab advised by Baishakhi Ray. My research sits at the intersection of AI and software engineering with a focus on reliability, verification, and trust in coding agents. Learn more about the field here.

Previously, I completed my undergrad in CS at Colby College with minors in math and financial markets. My honors thesis was advised by Naser Al Madi where I built a web tool called Fishy to detect code smells and improve program quality. I have also participated in two REUs at CMU, one focused on AI interpretability and the other in HCI.

Outside of research, I play ultimate frisbee semi-competitively and I tinker with digital design via photoshop and video editing.

Featured Publications

• 2026

• Policy alone is probably not the solution: A large-scale experiment on how developers struggle to design meaningful end-user explanations

  Nadia Nahar, Zahra Abba Omar, Jacob Tjaden, et al.

  Preprint 26'

  [arXiv]

• Less Talk, More Code: Practice-Based Instruction Improves Programming Skill Acquisition

  Gillian Gold, Jacob Tjaden, Paulo Carvalho

  CogSci '26

  [Paper]
• 2025

• The Balancing Act of Policies in Developing Machine Learning Explanations

  Jacob Tjaden

  ICSE '25

  [Paper] 🏆 SRC Winner

Achievements

2026

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP)

Article

Three years of funding

2025

Winner of Student Research Competition

Awarded best undergraduate research at ICSE 2025