Rafael Baptista
35 Falmouth Rd.
Arlington MA 02174 		Phone: (781) 367-9051
email: rafael@oroboro.com
web: http://oroboro.com/rafael
Skills:
  • Management of software development organizations with 20 people, multiple development teams and multiple products per year, including responsibility for budgeting and hiring. Experience starting and building software development organizations.
  • 14 years of professional software development experience, with a strong emphasis on the development of flexible, robust and re-usable components, including the development of several special purpose computer languages.
  • Platforms and Languages: C, C++, Windows, Unix, OpenGL, DirectX, Java, Console Game Development
  • Algorithms: natural language processing, speech recognition, signal processing, genomics, graphics, physics simulation, AI, path planning, 3D math, compiler design, game engine design
    • Experience:

    December 2003 - present
    Oroboro Interactive, Arlington MA
  • Lead Programmer at Harmonix for Phase, a game for iPod. Coded a library integrated into recent versions of Apple's iTunes to do automatic analysis of music to extract beat and transient information and use this data to automatically generate game levels for an iPod game.
  • Directed a small team to port the Guitar Hero 2 game engine from XBox360/PS3 to several versions of iPod hardware - including porting a complex tool chain, rewriting the graphics transforming the codebase from floating point to fixed point.
  • Completed development of Rayman Hoodlum's Revenge, for Ubisoft in January 2005.
  • Currently developing KJam, a very fast next generation software build system, used by a number of high profile software development companies.
    • June 2000 - November 2003 General Manager
    Helixe Games, Lexington MA
  • Founded Helixe, a division of THQ. Grew the organization from 2 people to 20 people, organized into 3 game teams.
  • Managed Helixe's day to day operations. The art director and each project lead reported directly to me.
  • Responsible for a budget of $1.5m per year, including budget planning for all the project, setting salary levels and planning major equipment purchases.
  • Managed the design and implementation of two game engines for a series of game products for the Nintendo GameBoy Advance. Our focus has been on developing robust, re-usable game engines, and flexible tool sets. Each of our game engines was developed with a full suite of graphical level editing tools. All of the game data is translated into an internally developed XML-like data description language and compiled into final binary game data using a single extensible data compiler.
  • Shipped 8 games, based on major properties such as Scooby Doo, Star Wars, Jimmy Neutron, Fairly Odd Parents and Rocket Power. All of the games shipped on schedule, on budget and on spec.
  • Our products have generated over $50m in sales, and sold over two million units world-wide.
  • Left Helixe as a top development group which has continued to prosper and grow.
    • November 1997 - June 2000 Senior Software Engineer
    GameFX Technology, Lexington MA
  • Implemented an advanced AI system for a critically acclaimed computer game, Sinistar Unleashed. The system is based on a Finite State Machine language that allows special finite state machine instructions to be embedded into C++ code. A pre-compiler converts the FSM instructions into C++ code, and the combined file is compiled into fully optimized object code. The language enforces correct finite state machine transition tables. This allows developers to quickly develop complex finite state machine based AIs and to debug the FSM code directly in commercial C++ development environments ( like MSVC ).
  • Wrote numerous physics based control systems: flight models, tractor beams, flocking, obstacle avoidance, skeletal physics, dog fighting, lead aiming, missile guidance.
  • Restructured an existing game engine to make a clean separation between game engine and game scripting code.
  • Developed a lean and flexible templatized container class library similar to STL, but smaller faster and simpler. It has been the basis of numerous code bases, including the Sinistar Engine, and all the Helixe tools. A version of this code is used in Valve's Half-Life 2 engine.
    • January 1996 - October 1997
    June 1991 - December 1994     		Senior Software Engineer
    Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Waltham MA
  • Designed and implemented a natural language processing system that translates English commands into short programs, allowing users to give complex commands in common English to computer programs. I am an inventor on two patents based on this technology. The system included the development a special purpose non-Turing-Complete programming language for natural language processing based on work by Dr. Stuart Schieber at Harvard.
  • This system is sold in a series of products called Dragon Naturally Speaking and L+H Voice Xpress. Six years after I developed it, it is still sold commercially, and is one of the few systems that was ported from Voice Express to Naturally Speaking after the merger of L+H and Dragon.
  • Wrote a part-of-speech based language model that can be trained automatically for any language. Significant memory reduction over old system. Similar to minimum entropy lossy compression.
  • Coded major algorithms for continuous speech recognition prototype. Collected, verified and maintained several very large speech data bases. Conducted extensive experiments on prototype and product recognizers to evaluate performance of recognition algorithms and identify failure modes.
    • January 1995 - January 1996 Scientific Programmer
    WIBR/MIT Center for Genome Research, Cambridge MA
  • Designed and implemented CO2, a system for physical mapping of genomes. It has a graphical interface and a scripting language. It integrates many sources of data, from WIBR's own sts-content and RH data, to Genethon's genetic maps and CEPH's ALU-PCR and fingerprint data.
  • This program was used to produce a 15,000 marker map of the human genome, the best and most complete map to date. It has subsequently been used by others to make maps of other organism including several mouse and rat genome maps.
  • Research results published in Science, December 1995, An STS-Based Map of the Human Genome.
    • Education:
    September 1987 - May 1991
    		Hampshire College, Amherst MA
  • B.S. Cognitive Science, specializing in linguistics and artificial intelligence.
  • Wrote neural network application to learn anaphoric binding in English.
  • 1990-1991 Stiles Scholar - Excellent Student of Cognitive Science




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