last updated on 14 May 2006

Gustavo Lacerda

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Website:
www.optimizelife.com

born 11 February 1979 in Recife, Brazil

Education

2003 - 2005: MSc in Logic - Universiteit van Amsterdam
Mostly Artificial Intelligence, Logic and Cognitive Science. Thesis was about an application of Automated Reasoning to cognitive modeling of the reasoning of physicists.

1997-2001: B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science - Bucknell University
Mostly Computer Science and pure and applied Mathematics and Statistics. Also classes in physics, psychology and linguistics.

1994-1997: International Baccalaureate - Southbank International School, London

Work Experience

Jan 2006 – : Lisp Programming Internship at Cadence Design Systems (Munich, Germany) Working in the custom development team: developing, debugging, testing and re-releasing packages.

2004-2005: Private Tutor at International School of Amsterdam, (Amsterdam, Netherlands) - Tutoring Mathematics and Physics to students 13-17, including a student in honors (IB higher-level) physics.

Sep 2001 - Jul 2002: Software Engineer at Amazon Technologies (Woburn, Massachusetts) - General Technical Position: web programming with JSP / JBuilder: front-end and back-end; Java programming: programming data conversion, automatic report generation; General support: Windows network support, permissions, mail server administration, webmastering, system updates.

Summer 2000: Research Intern at Bell Labs - Lucent Technologies (Murray Hill, New Jersey): Research intern at the Mathematics of Communications department. Implemented variations of the Viterbi algorithm (maximum likelihood) to decode linear error-correcting codes over simulated noisy channels.

Significant Programming Projects (not including class assignments)

2005: Equational Reasoner in Common Lisp: makes derivations by using tactics such as "solve" and "substitute".
2004: Bilingual dictionary builder in Perl:
builds a dictionary by matching words from a sentence-aligned parallel corpus, using position, cognate-matching and word-length correlations to improve performance. Finally, a small hand-made dictionary (100 words) was used as a basis from which to bootstrap. Evaluated on an Information Retrieval task, our dictionary achieved the gold standard of human-made translations.
2001: Wavelet-based compressor in VisualBasic:
lets you define your own orthonormal basis in which to compress 1-dimensional signals.
2000: Simulation of error-correcting codes in noisy channels in C++.
2000: Family-tree software in VisualBasic + MSAccess + SQL:
supported data entry, several views, and a relatedness search.
1993: The game Minesweeper in MS QuickBasic.

Programming Skills

Languages: Lisp (mostly CL), Perl, Java, VisualBasic, C/C++, Prolog
IDEs: Emacs, MS VisualStudio, JBuilder, DreamWeaver, various debuggers.
Databases:
SQL, MS Access, MS SQL Server.
Web programming:
HTML, XML, PHP, ASP, JSP, JavaScript.
Other
:
CVS, Coq, Shell Scripting (bash, VBScript).
Operating Systems: experience with Linux, Solaris, Windows

Languages

* English: native-level
* Portuguese: native-level
* Dutch: fluent
* French: semi-fluent
* German: good understanding
* Spanish: good understanding