Robert Azeem J.

Sound, data and AI, built from memories of your students families, STEM where young scientist learn about home.

Washington D.C

• My academic idol is W.E.B. Du Bois, he and a team of Atlanta University students hand-drew charts about Black life in America. Remembrance Lab students chart their neighborhood the same way!
• I am a data scientist and TEDx speaker. Kids will get to develop story-telling and learn the science behind the technology that captures their stories. Kids hear their own voice as a waveform before they ever edit a podcast.
• I've built tap-to-play tech for Google and Unilever. I designed hardware based learning experiences and students will build a listening wall, to see their learning develop with them.

Hi, I'm Robert Azeem Jackson III, Rob to most, and I teach young people to be scientists of the place they come from. I'm a Gates Millennium Scholar and Georgetown graduate with an M.S. in Learning Analytics from Teachers College, Columbia University, where I studied how algorithms treat young people's data. I founded Cypher × Remembrance, a data studio in Ward 8, and gave a TEDx talk called "The Power of Remembrance." This summer the DC Department of Employment Services named our apprentice program an Outstanding Host Site. My teaching philosophy is simple: real work, real tools, a real audience. A child will give everything to something they're making for a person they respect. So in Remembrance Lab, students record an elder, learn how a voice turns into data, test whether AI can understand their grandparents, and chart what they find. What makes the lab different is the dataset: your family and your neighborhood. Every recording comes with a consent form parents co-sign, and nothing is shared unless you say yes. Students build skills tied to science and computer science standards, and leave with what no textbook gives: a story they saved and a bond with the elder who told it. My grandfather's last words to me were "you have to live with the choices you make." I choose to help your child remember, and I'll care for their voice the way I'd care for my own family's. See you at the showcase.