I am an Associate Professor and Chair of the Computer Engineering Department at San José State University. My current areas of research focus are Artificial Intelligence-based Personal Assistants, Natural Language Processing, and Knowledge Management. I am the holder of over 44 patents and counting, and my research work has been cited over 14,000 times. Prior to San José State University, I spent around 15 years in the tech industry in the Bay Area in research, architecture, and leadership roles.
I have received multiple innovation and research awards, including top 10 finalist in the Fujitsu Next Generation Product Idea Contest (out of 454) in 2016 for my project "Robo Butler", the Best Paper Award at SmartGridComm 2014, the Best Application Paper Award at IEEE Big Data Service 2022, and Best Paper Award in the Business Intelligence vertical at the 2025 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
I received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.A. degree with a double major in Computer Science (summa cum laude) and Mathematics from Mount Holyoke College.
Email: jorjeta.jetcheva "followed by" sjsu.edu
Congrats to my students Anoushka Gade and Hardi Trivedi for winning the Best Paper Award in the Business Intelligence vertical at the IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IEEE CAI 2025) for our paper “It’s About Time: Incorporating Temporality in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models”!
My interview with Provost Vincent Del Casino on the Accidental Geographer podcast, March 2025.
Principal Investigator for NSF S-STEM Award "Empowering Students to Succeed in Engineering and Computer Science" ($2.5 million), June 2023-June 2029
SJSU AI Advisory Committee Member, Fall 2024-Present
Strategic Plan Goal 2 "Excel and Lead" Committee, Spring 2024-Present
AI Research Cluster Lead, Fall 2023-Spring 2025
2023 CSU STEM-NET faculty fellow for San José State University
Best Application Paper Award at IEEE BDS 2022 with Master's thesis student Garima Chaphekar: G. Chaphekar and J.G.Jetcheva. HealthLies: Dataset and Machine Learning Models for Detecting Fake Health News. Proceedings of IEEE Big Data Service (BDS), 8th Annual IEEE Conference on Big Data Services and Machine Learning Applications, August 2022.
From 2017 to 2020, I was the global R&D lead for the Virtual Assistant portfolio of Accenture Operations, where I was responsible for leading a global team conceptualizing, building and deploying Virtual Assistants, AI-Powered Knowledge Platforms, and Agent Assist solutions. From 2012 to 2017, I was a Research Scientist and Manager at Fujitsu Laboratories of America (FLA), where I was responsible for conceiving and executing research projects in the areas of machine learning, natural language processing, Smart Grid, and home automation. Prior to FLA, I was part of Itron's Smart Grid Architecture and Standards team, and prior to Itron, I was the Systems Architect of Bay Area startup Firetide, where I was responsible for the design and analysis of multi-hop wireless mesh protocols and algorithms, and for the evolution of the company's mesh product line.