Resume : Cristobal Baray
cris.resume@baray.com
Objective
A challenging position designing, implementing and managing
uniquely satisfying applications.
Artificial intelligence (adaptive)
and educational projects are of special interest to me.
Work Experience
- Yahoo! Sports 2004-present
- Influential team member of the Yahoo! Sports group as we increased our revenue 10x during my first 4 years. We also became the #1 sports site on the web.
- 2006-present: Senior engineering manager, overseeing the sports site. Grew the team from 3 to 9 developers, who have been responsible for: the redesign of the entire site in early 2007, the deployment of a scalable webservices solution for the 2008 Olympics to be consumed by Yahoo! properties worldwide, and balancing the constant urge to innovate for our users with the needs of our sponsors and corporate initiatives. Converted an intern into a full-time hire, promoted 3 of my team members, have two remote direct reports, and have helped define career paths and yearly goals for the entire team. Took on the responsiblity for defining and improving our development processes, within sports and the Yahoo! media engineering team as a whole.
- 2004-2006: Senior software engineer. Focused on developing client side applications for realtime game tracking, including fantasy team calculations. I lead the transition of the applications from a DHTML/Java hybrid architecture into pure Flash applications. Responsibilities also included general architecture and maintenance issues around the streaming media and editorial content. Started the internal Sports team hack days, which began as an outlet for the development team to implement their ideas and grew into a more polished event, with cross functional teams, and the prize of "getting roadmap support from the business unit".
- Dejima Inc 2000-2004
- Held titles of senior software architect, principal engineer, and
technical manager; reported to CTO or VP of engineering. Worked across all aspects of the Dejima product line.
- Core technology: Was part of three-person team that designed
and implemented in Java the multi-agent technology for natural
language understanding. Developed and
maintained a visual agent editor and several deployment tools, which became the
company's SDK. Led project that ported core technology into the J2ME environment
to run on Research in Motion BlackBerry devices.
- Application prototypes/deployments: Led teams (2-4 direct reports) responsible for various
Dejima prototypes, which were deployed across several modalities - web
(desktop and wireless), web services, e-mail, SMS, WAP, and VXML.
For each prototype, took part in product and project management, architecture
research and design, implementation, test suite specifications and user testing.
Managed five-person team that developed Dejima Direct for
salesforce automation applications. The version for salesforce.com was the only
product salesforce.com has OEMed at the time: it was their Wireless Edition. Led team that
developed wireless interface for Saratoga Systems iAvenue product, which was sold to several
Saratoga customers.
- Engineering management: Continually strove to improve processes within
engineering, internally and externally. Led by example when introducing XML within
the engineering group, developing with unit tests and logging, implementing
some extreme programming practices, defining and motivating stricter development
processes, leading reviews (on design, code and projects) to ensure our
approach remained realistic and repeatable, and maintaining a higher standard for documentation across the board (functional
requirements, code documentation and statements of work).
- Patent applications: Submitted 4 patents on Dejima technologies
(2 as the primary author - both of which have been granted. 7,302,394 and 7,353,176).
Education
- Indiana University, Bloomington
: 1994-1999
- Ph.D. Cognitive Science
Ph.D. Computer Science
Thesis title : Evolution of Coordination in Reactive Multi-Agent Systems
Funding: National Science Foundation: Graduate Research Traineeship
Six-year NSF fellowship providing full support for dissertation research
in robotics and intelligent control.
- University of California, San Diego
: 1989-1994
- B.S. Cognitive Science
B.S. Computer Science
Teaching Experience
- Robotics instructor, Digital Media Academy
- Led a week long robotics course for teens in the summer of 2007 and 2009. Course developed the fundamentals in robot design utilizing the Lego NXT Mindstorms kit. Introduced the class to basic problem solving techniques across multiple domains: hardware, mechanics, and software.
- Advisor, Knownspace Project at Indiana University
- Architecture design team member of
the Knownspace project,
an ambitious project aimed at replacing the user's desktop
with an adaptable, customizable data manager.
Performed supervisory role
in the implementation of the application and for some advanced
topics, implemented the Java code myself.
- Teaching Assistant, UCSD
- Served as teaching assistant in an undergraduate course on cognitive linguistics.
- Workshop leader for McNair Scholars Program, UCSD
- Tutored minority and under-privileged computer science
majors in discrete mathematics, combinatorics, graph theory, and compiler
theory. Assisted in creating support groups for students.
Publications and Presentations
Presented and published
research work at several refereed,
international conferences focused
on software engineering, parallel and distributed computing,
complex systems, multi-agent systems, intelligent information
systems, and semiotics. Projects presented included a new
genetic algorithm design architecture, which emphasizes the user
interface and experience; a distributed genetic algorithm;
autonomous agent resource allocation algorithms; and the
evolution of coordination in a multi-agent environment.