Kenneth Shor

Samsung Information Systems America

Senior Software Engineer

Nov 2012 - Present

After the Fanfeedr aquisition, a few of us moved to Silicon Valley to found the Smart TV Services group in Samsung's Digital Media Solutions lab. Smart TV Services is responsible for all Social Media and Sports offerings from Samsung on the Smart TV Platform.

• Prototyped several 'first screen' application designs
• Architected the Social TV client application and twitter firehose backend
• When firehose access never came, I led the technical redesign moving most responsibilities to the Social TV client
• Led the Social TV team from concept, development, through QA to shipped product

Fanfeedr.com (aquired by Samsung)

Lead Engineer

Aug 2011 - Oct 2012

Fanfeedr.com was a new kind of sports news aggregator. We had over 10k sources that we would poll for the latest stories, which were then run through our machine-learning backend and automatically added to our team feeds based on relevance. We also had a product for publishers which would automatically curate sports mailing lists and post stories and images to our clients' twitter, facebook and websites.

• Stabilized our API offering (many bug fixes)
• Cleaned up our webserver to use our API instead of directly accessing our DB
• Organized the web frontend into modules using require.js and backbone.js
• Led the development of our "Publisher's Dashboard" product through the full product cycle
• Designed and implemented our 'hotness' server which determind which articles were currently trending in social channels
• Created a build step that would automatically update file names on deployment for 'cache busting'
• Led the effort to port our css to Stylus
• Migrated our article and related DB tables to HBase

Atmosphere Proximity (BBDO)

Developer

Jan 2010 - Aug 2011

Atmosphere Proximity is a full service digital marketing system. It is the North American headquarters of the Proximity Worldwide Network and a member of the Omnicom Group of companies, the world's largest marketing services organization.

• Initial development of Atmosphere Proximity's corporate website in python with django
• Maintenance and feature updates of the Atmosphere Proximity website
• Developed various QA tools so we could more efficiently leverage our small QA team
• Developing software for mobile devices including an unreleased children's e-book player which supported embedded micro-games
• Creating animated advertisements
• Building corporate landing pages
• Integrating social networking platforms (Twitter, Facebook) into various ad units and websites
• Maintaining and extending our internal project management platform
• Writing automation tools to generate advertising campaigns
• Researching and prototyping for new technologies and platforms including HTML canvas, and iOS
• Partial client list: AT&T, Fedex, Johnson & Johnson, Lowes, Monster

AiGameDev.com

Contributor

Oct 2009 - Oct 2010

AiGameDev.com is the central hub for game AI programmers. It offers articles and online classes for continued professional education. They also develop the AI Sandbox, which is a C++ framework for rapidly prototyping game ideas; this is where I contributed. The sandbox includes many algorithms and frameworks based on the cutting edge of industry standards and academic research, including low and higher level animation systems along with AI systems and infrastructure.

Implemented various IK algorithms including:

• 2 Bone analytic IK
• N-Bone Jacobian pseudo-inverse
• N-Bone Cyclic Coordinate Descent

Code Collective, The Far Wilds

Game Programmer

May 2008 - Oct 2009

Code Collective developed and continues to maintain The Far Wilds. The Far Wilds is an original game which consists of a very elaborate 3D fantasy chess style gameplay coupled with a Magic The Gathering style mechanism for placing units, buildings, spells and enchantments on the game board. I was originally brought in as a programming intern and after two short months was hired as a full time programmer.

• Designed and developed the single player AI
• Ported the game to flash and developed the proxy server along with one other engineer
• Ported the game's AI from C++ to ActionScript for the flash version
• Implemented the behaviours for hundreds of in game entities
• Developed client-side support for multiple game modes
• Designed and implemented a dynamic HUD system
• Implemented the game's server side replay system
• Utilized and extended Right Brain Games GUI library

Big Time Gaming

Game Programmer

Dec 2008 - Feb 2009

We created a new version of the Counterstrike Mod Villains and Heroes for Counterstrike Source. SuperHero Source is an extension to counterstrike that allows players to gain experience and "level-up" while playing counterstrike. Players are able to add various super powers to their player based their current "level".

• Took an advisory role during initial development
• Implemented various "super power" abilities
• Debugged problems related to various server crashes