Matt Bamberger - About Matt Bamberger

Hello, and welcome. My name's Matt Bamberger. This site's my vehicle for discussing various geeky topics including Artificial Intelligence, the singularity, life extension, and transhumanism.

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Most of my writing happens on Live Journal. I mirror the main stream here, but you might want to read it at the source.

Need something to read? How about one of these fine essays?

Š2005-2008 Matt Bamberger

About Matt Bamberger

Professional history

Intelligent Artifice: 10/2006 -

Founder
Intelligent Artifice is my new AI research company. Although I bounce ideas off a number of people, IA is currently a one-person outfit. My present goal is to rapidly gain AI experience by experimenting with a number of theories I have regarding pattern recognition.

Valve Software: 2001 - 2006

Development manager, Steam
I was the development manager for the Steam team. Steam's a massive (1 million peak simultaneous users, 2.5 million unique users per month) online gaming service that allows users to buy and update games, as well as providing a host of other services such as in-game instant messaging and cheat prevention. In addition to presenting some very interesting technical challenges, Steam was a market leader in an emerging market, so my job involved solving a lot of fundamental business and product design problems.

Engineer
Before working on Steam, I worked as a contractor developing systems for preventing cheating and piracy in our online games. I created the original Valve Anti-Cheat system (VAC).

Retirement: 2000 - 2001

After leaving Microsoft, I briefly experimented with being retired. I wasn't very good at it.

Microsoft: 1988 - 2000

Software Design Engineer, XBox
Before leaving Microsoft, I spent a few months working on the XBox game console before it was officially called XBox.

Development manager, Simulation Games
I was the development manager for the Simulation Games group at Microsoft, shipping Flight Simulator 2000 and Combat Flight Simulator 1 as well as a number of smaller titles. The Sims development team consisted of four separate product teams with a total of about 35 developers.

Development manager, Charting Product Unit
When the Charting team split off from the core Excel development team, I became the development manager for the Charting Product Unit. We produced a charting engine that shipped both as a core part of Excel and as an embeddable component with Word and Powerpoint. During my tenure Charting grew to about ten developers and shipping with Excel 95 and 97.

Development lead, Excel Product Unit
I was the dev lead for the charting team on Excel for the Excel 5.0 release.

Software Design Engineer, Excel Product Unit
I worked as a developer on the Excel charting team, shipping 3.0 and 4.0.

Software Design Engineer, Learning Systems Development
I started at Microsoft as a developer on the Help team. I wrote the text engine for the Excel 2.2 Help system and for the Windows 3.0 Help system. In addition to shipping with several versions of Windows, the Windows 3 Help system was the foundation for many of Microsoft's early multimedia products.

University of Chicago: 1984-1988

I studied physics at UC from 1984 to 1988. After getting a job offer from Microsoft, I dropped out of the final physics class I needed for my degree, to the considerable annoyance of both my advisor and my parents. Much of my time at UC was spent in the astronomy department, where I wrote software for the Local InterStellar Medium project, as well as doing some minor research of my own on 21 cm hydrogen emissions.