Diego Calderon

Highly adaptable and lifelong learner.

Diego Calderon

MS in computer science student @UIUC. Former Research programmer at NCSA.

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Education

  • M.S. in Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (expected 2024)
  • B.S. in Computer Science, University of Arkansas, 2018
    • Magna Cum Laude, GPA: 3.85/4.0
    • Thesis: Training Machine Learning Agents in a 3D Game Engine
    • Minor in Mathematics

Work and Research Experience

  • 12/2018 - 07/2022: Research Programmer at NCSA
    • Developed software with researchers across various fields (e.g. civil engineering, economics, and environmental sciences).
    • Implemented the OpenID Connect authentication protocol for IN-CORE (developed an external authentication service for our API Gateway, refactored our services to use the tokens, and developed a trusted client for our Python library).
  • 01/2017 - 10/2018: Research Assistant for Prof. Civelli (Department of Economics @UofA)
    • Developed and managed a toolkit for GIS data analysis.
    • Designed and developed a graphical user interface in MATLAB for a cognitive assessment study: ”A Flexible and Customizable Method for Assessing Cognitive Abilities.”
  • 07/2017 - 05/2018: Research Assistant for Prof. Datta (Department of Statistics @UofA)
    • Debugged a 3D printing robot positioning problems.
    • Developed a Shiny app to visualize crime hotspots using crime data retrieved from police departments, .
  • 07/2017 - 05/2018: Gameplay and Tools Programmer (@Tesseract)
    • Created a game design document for the game Being, drawing inspiration from puzzle games and psychology metaphors such as black dog.
    • Rapidly developed prototypes as proof of concepts in the early stages of development.
  • 05/2017 - 07/2017: Undergraduate Research Fellow (Department of Computer Science @WashU)
    • Designed an algorithm to solve the joint task of learning under conditional distributions.
    • Presented a poster of our work in AAAI-18.
  • 01/2016 - 05/2017: Game Designer (@Tesseract)
    • Designed, implemented, and tested functional spaces of game levels.
    • Collaboratively designed, implemented, and balanced gameplay.

Skills

  • Programming Languages: Python, C#, Java, C++, R
  • Tools: Unity, Maya (familiar), Unreal (learning)

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