Luís Filipe Brandão is a software engineer and a machine learning researcher.

He is the head of data at where he spends most of his time writing APIs, working on scalability and on data modelling. He is experienced in multiple programming languages and systems, and is always looking to learn new technologies. Java, Python and JavaScript are his favorites.

Currently living between Boston and San Francisco, he lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years, where he studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam, worked on text mining at and volunteered for . While in Amsterdam, he participated on the and spent a summer for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

Say hi at mail@luisbrandao.net or check what he is up to on GitHub, Twitter and Tumblr.

Professional and research Interests

Distributed systems, information retrieval, software engineering, systems integration, machine learning

Professional Experience

2011 – present – Head of Data – Zeega

As a lead backend developer and data engineer, he is responsible for designing and implementing all backend systems. Early work at Zeega included application declouping, implementing a public API, improving the development process and deployment management. More recently, has worked on designing and creating scalable distributed services. Tools used include RabbitMQ, MongoDB, Solr, MySQL, PHP5 / Symfony2, node.js and Python. Zeega is an open source application and its code is available on GitHub.

2011 – Web Mining Assistant – Textkernel

Part-time position with diverse tasks related to software development, information retrieval and machine learning. Daily tasks included writing Perl and Python scripts for information extraction (job boards, twitter), and implementing map-reduce jobs with Hadoop, among others.

2010 – Student Programmer – Berkman Center at Harvard University – Google Summer of Code 2010

Designed and implemented in Ruby on Rails a data integration system for the discovery of hidden connections between existing data sets. Open source project developed under the Google Summer of Code Program 2010 for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The code is available on GitHub.

2007 – 2010 – Software Engineer and Consultant, DOCKSgroup

Developer and consultant in document management projects. Primary responsibilities included the analysis, design and implementation of system integration components. Helped the definition of a development process that included the use quality analysis, code reviews and continuous integration as standard practice among the development team. Led the definition of research strategies and innovation guidelines for the company.

Education

2013 (Expected) – MSc. Artificial Intelligence – Track Learning Systems – University of Amsterdam

2008 – BSc. Informatics and Computer Engineering – Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa

Other

2011 – Attended the 1st Lisbon Machine Learning School

2011 – Volunteered at Subbacultcha

2011 – Collaborated on the Sensate Journal

2010 – Knitting machine + Arduinos hacking dev camp’10 – Mediamatic – Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2007 – European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information – Trinity College – Dublin, Ireland