Tel Aviv University

Software Engineer (distributed software / embedded software / electrical engineering / rapid prototyping / hacking)

Wayve

Technical Lead

Took a year off work to travel the world with my family!

Career Break

Travel

Worked on various projects within the Android Audio team. Highlights include:
- Ownership of the "sound trigger" component of the Android framework (responsible for low-power listening for auditory keywords, such as "Hey, Google"). This included a complete rewrite of the entire module, to improve its maintainability and robustness. Collaborated with various partners inside and outside the company. In the process, developed some new generic patterns and best practices for Android Framework code and worked on getting those adopted by other teams.
- Ownership of head-tracking support in the Android Framework for enabling spatial audio on Android devices. This included specifying a HID-based protocol for sharing head pose information between head-sets and the Android Framework, processing of this information in order to result in a smooth user experience and integration with the Virtualizer effect. The project required leadership and collaboration with numerous stakeholders inside and outside the organization. Being a very complicated integration, I took a lead role in facilitating a productive and efficient collaboration between the different teams involved.

Google

Staff Software Engineer - Android Audio

Worked on a novel project as part of Alphabet X, aiming to revolutionize industrial automation using integration of industry-standard robotics and sensing hardware with advanced task- and motion-planning algorithms, while taking advantage of Google's distributed computation infrastructure.
Led a team of software engineers, responsible for building the necessary framework for solving high-degree-of-freedom planning problems. The framework allowed plugging in various planning algorithms as well as rigorous description of different kinds of problems.

Key contributor to 3 related patents.

Staff Software Engineer - Intrinsic

Worked on various robotics-related projects. Highlights include:
- System design, software (in C) and firmware (in SystemVerilog) of a high-end depth-camera for robotics. The project included close collaboration with ME, EE and computer vision algorithm experts and rigorous design to ensure laser safety.
- Applied research on choosing an appropriate realtime communication protocol between the various controllers comprising a robot. Included a deep-dive and experimentation with EtherCAT.

Staff Software Engineer - Google Robotics

Worked on Google[x]'s Project Loon (https://x.company/projects/loon/) since its early days.
My primary focus was realtime, embedded, safety-critical software for balloon avionics. I've done a great variety of tasks to get the project going, ranging from system engineering, designing several PCBs through reverse engineering off-the-shelf products and hacking them to fit our purposes to going to the field to launch balloons!

Key contributor to 2 related patents.

Staff Software Engineer - Loon

Initiated, developed and commercialized the IOIO open source project (https://github.com/ytai/ioio/wiki)

The IOIO is a novel circuit board that allows Android devices (and later other computers) to easily interact with external electronic devices, such as motors and sensors. It has been sold and used world-wide for over a decade for hobby projects, prototypes and commercial products and is well-known and liked among the Maker community to this day.

This project involved the initial idea, development of various generations of the circuit board ; development and maintenance of the on-board and host-side software ; collaboration with manufacturers ; building and supporting a user community, presenting at various exhibitions, conferences and seminars ; building several demo projects to showcase some of the capabilities.

This has been a project of love and not profit. I enjoyed giving back to the Maker community that I was part of, learning new skills and combining my passion for technology, design and art.

Self-employed

Inventor and developer - IOIO

Worked in the Google Trends group.
Led the backend team for two years.

Senior Software Engineer - Google Trends

Led a team responsible for development of audio-related core software for Samsung's mobile phones. Projects included initiation and development of an advanced pure-software synthesizer conforming to MIDI and DLS standards, which out-performed every commercial solution at the time.

As part of my role I represented Samsung electronics in an industry-wide standard body (Khronos) and became the Spec Editor of the first OpenSL-ES (standard API for mobile audio) standard.

Key contributor to multiple patents related to the projects I've been involved with.

Ytai Ben-Tsvi