Who is ATFGame?

ATFGame

I am a software design engineer currently working for the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft. Previously I worked on the last two releases of Microsoft Office.

When I'm not working, I like to spend time with friends. But who doesn't? I also enjoy several hobbies in my spare time. Even though I code for a living, I try to do some programming on my own. In particular I like to work on global illumination rendering. I also enjoy taking pictures, hiking, taking pictures while hiking, playing the piano, and playing games.

I am intimately interested in computer science. (And you already know I like programming.) I started programming with GW Basic and QBasic in elementary school. During that time I developed games by copying Basic programs line by line from books or magazines and then modifying them. In high school, I took AP Computer Science. As I learned C/C++, I started to do a lot of programming on my own. I developed my own versions of Pong (Mode 13h), Tetris, and an expression-tree calculator. I've also made several attempts at writing games in the form of prototypes.

As an undergraduate student at Cornell I found that I liked quite a few topics in computer science. I was very good at operating systems and architecture and also thoroughly enjoyed automata and algorithms. But I found that my heart is really in computer graphics. Ever since taking an introductory graphics course on my sophomore year with Professor Donald Greenberg, I've been completely hooked on graphics. On my junior year I took a graduate level graphics course on advanced rendering which I TA'd for the following year.

I did some research work on graphics as well. I started out by developing a photon mapping ray tracer with Dr. Kavita Bala and presented the work at BOOM 2003 (Bits On Our Minds - a computer science project fair at Cornell).

I continued working with Dr. Bala on ways to improve the rendering speed of the "Edge and Point Rendering System" by moving portions of the per-frame computation code onto a modern programmable GPU. I won first place on the Intel Student Research Contest (2004) for the work. The work was then continued and published to Graphics Interface 2006. You can find more details on the paper: Implementing the Render Cache and the Edge-and-Point Image on Graphics Hardware.

Nowadays I spend most of my time developing software that I hope will contribute to the health of many people.