Hi! I'm Yona. I am a product engineer, who loves exploring non-traditional approaches to coding and design that reimagine how users interact with technology. Currently, I split my time between building machine learning models at Adobe, mentoring, and exploring emerging technologies.
I firmly believe that technology should be accessible to everyone regardless of background. By equipping diverse people with the right tools, we can collectively make the world better.
Current product interests: productivity and mindfulness applications, ethical AI systems, and technology that advances social causes.
Outside of work, you'll find me taking care of Oscar, my lease horse (currently busy bribing him with 🥕🥕🥕 and preparing for my first equitation show), practicing piano (curr. Chopin Concerto No. 1), and reading books (follow my reads on my Goodreads).
selected works
Zizi is a robot, a cute accountability pal, that helps you get a good night’s sleep. Just give Zizi your phone to avoid staring at it and exposing yourself to blue light when you are about to fall asleep. Zizi incorporates the theory behind the power of cuteness and habit building to make the process more fun and effortless.
Zizi’s design is 3D printed & hand painted. It uses Arduino, LED lights and a bluetooth transmitter to change colors based on initial settings that you modify via a phone app. Part of NYU ITP 2022 thesis project.
Vistaprint helps small business owners create expertly designed, up-to-date custom marketing – the assortment of products they need to look and feel professional, prepared and plugged in.
With more than 20 million customers worldwide, Vistaprint offers an enormous selection of customizable design templates for marketing and promotional materials.
While at Work & Co, I partnered with their technology and design teams to deliver key improvements across the platform. My contributions included rebuilding search logic, developing button animations, creating responsive quick-view interfaces, implementing SEO enhancements, and optimizing performance through algorithm refinement and code refactoring. Built with React, Typescript, & Gatsby.
Draw the Word is a traditional Draw and Guess game but with multiple drawers and only one guesser. All the players except the one who guesses have to draw on a single canvas by tilting their phones.
How to Play: Arrange yourselves in a circle with phones, connect to the server via the link, where one random player becomes the guesser while everyone else receives a shared prompt on their devices and uses phone-tilt to draw collaboratively on the canvas for 60 seconds (communicating with each other but never revealing the prompt), while the guesser tries to identify the word either during or after the drawing period.
The Draw the Word game was created using p5.js, node.js, and socket.io.
Mr. Scribbles is a The Dancing Drawing Robot, created to help people feel more comfortable about their bodies, about their movements — about being weird sometimes.
To control the robot, try to recreate the dancing poses!
Created with ml5js for pose classification model training, p5js for easy interface, Arduino Mega for the physical core, and a lot of hot glue.
Airi Flies is an interactive game played using your voice. To start the game say PLAY. Say PEW to make Airi fly. If you lose more than 8 points or hit an obstacle, you lose.
This project was created to encourage people to get out of their comfort zone and feel more confident about themselves regardless of what they do and what they look or sound like.
P.S. Works for Google Chrome and Firefox.
The sound-classification model was trained using Teachable Machine on 120 samples of 9 different female and male voices in addition to 84 samples of background noise. The model then is used with p5js.js to create visual elements, that change their positions and appearances whenever the classes PLAY or PEW are detected.