Jacob Danovitch

Experience

Microsoft Search, Assistant and Intelligence

Redmond, WA

Data & Applied Scientist II
  • Leading development of ranking models used across M365 Copilot Chat & Search serving millions of users daily.
  • Shipped 5% improvement to search result quality by designing novel LLM-powered training strategy.
  • Architected internal recall evaluation tool now used as part of ship criteria for new rankers.
  • Tech lead for research project fine-tuning SLMs/LLMs for document ranking; mentored & led 5 early-career ICs, published results in Microsoft Journal of Applied Research.
  • Promoted to current role in March 2024.

Mila - Quebec AI Insititute

Montreal, Canada

Graduate Research Assistant
  • Conducting research on graph representation learning in the Complex Data Lab.
  • Released popular benchmark for temporal graph learning in collaboration with SNAP and PyTorch-Geometric maintainers.
  • Published at top ML conferences including NeurIPS 2023/2024, PAKDD 2023, WWW 2021.

Refugee Law Lab - Osgoode School of Law, York University

Toronto, Canada (Remote)

Data Science Tech Lead
  • Built data platform for legal analytics project from the ground up using open-source software.
  • Implemented pipelines for scraping, parsing, & analyzing Canadian federal immigration court cases using Prefect & Ray.
  • Delivered version-controlled datasets to research team using Delta Lake, LakeFS, Kubernetes, and GitOps (FluxCD / Terraform).

Microsoft Search, Assistant and Intelligence

Redmond, WA / Canada (Remote)

Data & Applied Science Intern
  • Completed 3 internships with Outlook Search Relevance & Graph Intellicence Sciences teams at MSAI.
  • Designed novel inductive Graph Neural Network architectures for search personalization.
  • Developed task-agnostic embedding quality metrics for monitoring model retraining.

Microsoft Search, Assistant, and Intelligence

Redmond, WA

Software Engineering Intern
  • Completed 2 internships with Cortana conversational science & engineering excellence teams.
  • Trained & deployed character-level RNN for intent classification and NER to extract meeting details from Outlook emails.
  • Author on patent awarded to parent project: Fenton, Robert Ross et. al, Composing rich content messages. US-20210073293-A1, 2021.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)

Ottawa, Canada

Data Science Consultant
  • Scraping, cleaning, and aggregating data on health violations in long-term care homes.
  • Implemented high-performance scraping pipeline to parse semi-structured PDFs from government reports.

Carleton University

Ottawa, Canada

Teaching Assistant
  • Completed teaching assistantships for undergraduate computer science (Web Development, Discrete Math I, Intro to CS I) and graduate-level journalism (Storytelling with Data) courses.
  • Gave lectures in professors' absence, assisted students in-class, graded evaluations, and held office hours.

Education

McGill University

Montreal, Canada

MSc Machine Learning | Cum. GPA: 4
  • Completed MSc thesis on inductive link prediction with GNNs under supervision of Prof. Reihaneh Rabbany.

Carleton University

Ottawa, Canada

BSc Computer Science, Honors | Minor in Psychology | Cum. GPA: 4
  • Graduated August 2020 with high distinction (Dean's Honour List from 2018-2020).
  • Completed BSc thesis on explainable hate speech detection using language models under supervision of Prof. Majid Komeili.
August 18, 2025 Jacob Danovitch · Résumé 1

Selected Publications

Gastinger, J et al (2024). Tgb 2.0: A benchmark for learning on temporal knowledge graphs and heterogeneous graphs. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37.

Huang, S et al (2023). Temporal graph benchmark for machine learning on temporal graphs. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36.

Huang, S and Danovitch, J and Rabusseau, G and Rabbany, R. (2023). Fast and attributed change detection on dynamic graphs with density of states. Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

Pelrine, K* and Danovitch, J* and Rabbany, R. (2021). The Surprising Performance of Simple Baselines for Misinformation Detection. Proceedings of The Web Conference 2021.

Fenton, RR et al. (2021). Composing rich content messages.. U.S. patent granted: #US-20210073293-A1.

Pelrine, K* and Danovitch, J* and Orozco Camacho, A and Rabbany, R. (2020). Detecting Informative COVID-19 Tweets by Attending over Linked Documents. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text.

Danovitch, J. (2020). Linking social media posts to news with siamese transformers. 9th International Conference on Information Technology Convergence and Services (ITCSE 2020), Vancouver, CA.

Danovitch, J. (2019). Trouble with the Curve: Predicting Future MLB Players Using Scouting Reports. 2019 Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference, Pittsburgh, USA.

Grants & Awards

NSERC CGS-M Research Award

$17500 (declined)

Carleton University

Clarence C. Gibson Scholarship

$3000

Carleton University

Reproducible Research Competition Finalist

$1000

Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference

I-CUREUS Grant

$2250

Carleton University

E.W.R. Steacie Scholarship

$3000

Carleton University

Lester B. Pearson Scholarship

$3000

Carleton University

President's Scholarship

$3000

Carleton University

Leadership Roles

Carleton University

Ottawa

Recognized Study Group Leader
  • Co-led study group for introductory CS courses, leading sessions for as many as 50 students at once.
  • Prepared and presented Jupyter Notebooks to interactive demonstrate course material.
  • Implemented website for group using Node.js and React, using Firebase for authentication and content delivery.

STEM Fellowship

Virtual

Data Science Team Volunteer
  • Assisted in development & organization of the Big Data Challenge, a competition promoting data science education.
  • Created workshops for machine learning such as k-means clustering, OLS regression, and stochastic gradient descent.

Carleton Computer Science Society

Ottawa

First Year Representative
  • Elected to position co-representing 1st year students in the Computer Science program.
  • Helped design first line of CCSS merchandise and organized sales.
August 18, 2025 Jacob Danovitch · Résumé 2