The person
behind the helmet.
My name is Fernando Bevilacqua, I am the CTO and Head of Development at Optidata. Formely I was Adjunct Senior Lecturer of Computer Science at Federal University of Fronteira Sul (UFFS), teaching programming and researching human-computer interaction and AI. Before that I was a game developer. I am a passionate open-source contributor who mainly work with web technologies, AI, games and human-computer interaction.
Work
I have hands-on experience on a variety of technologies and software projects, including game development, enterprise application development, and finally research/teaching work related to human-computer interaction, computer graphics and programming. I’ve been a team member, team leader and also project manager. I’ve used a dozen of programming languages, such as C, C++, PHP, Flash/AS3, Haxe, Java, Javascript, Typescript, R, Matlab and Python.
Education
In 2007 I obtained a BSc degree in Computer Science at Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM), Brazil. In 2009 I finished my masters in Computation focused on Computer Graphics, also at UFSM. Finally, in 2018 I received my PhD in Informatics at the University of Skövde, Sweden. I worked with human-computer interaction and computer vision at the InGame Lab.
Cool stuff about me
- 🕹️ Co-founded a game development company and shipped a bunch of games (PC and web).
- 📚 I’ve been a lecturer of Computer Science for several years.
- 📡 I’ve been a consultant for companies working with healthtech, AI/speech, games and education.
- ⚡ Built my own code editor (Codebot), then made it a web-based editor.
- 🔭 I wrote a few scientific papers about emotions, games and computers.
- 🧐 Published a software/method for detecting stress and boredom of players based on heart rate and facial actions (all done remotely, no sensors).
- 💬 I like to teach and write tutorials (already wrote about many topics related to gamedev).
- 🙌 The tutorial series Understanding Steering Behaviors that I authored is top 1 result on Google regarding steering behaviors. It has also been praised by Craig W. Reynolds, the original invetor of the technique (🤯).
- 😅 Built a software (Besearcher) to run my experiments and e-mail me when anything interesting pops-up, so I could have more time for coffee.
- 💚 I’ve been involved with open source for quite a while. I’ve been a co-maintainer (of Flixel Community, a game engine), main maintainer (of cvui, a C++/python ui lib for OpenCV) and contributor (Haxeflixel and Flixel Studio, for instance).