ANDREW CANTINO
I'm an
experimentalist, and
experimentalist. I enjoy making online
websites and tools, and
websites and tools, such as
SelectorGadget and
SelectorGadget (selectorgadget.com), a Chrome extension for generating optimal CSS selectors, and
BeeLine Reader.
BeeLine Reader (beelinereader.com), a tool that makes reading faster and easier by using color gradients to guide your eyes.
I've spent time
studying web security.
researching security and privacy, mostly in web applications. I found some subtle security holes in Gmail and Google Docs in early 2011. Somewhat more recently, I found a number of security holes in Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
I'm also deeply interested in physics and
emergent processes in nature.
the simulation of emergent processes and self-organizing systems, primarily from the natural world. Check out a simulation of ants exploring and
working together
communicating via pheromone signals. These pheromone signals are local, and although the ants know nothing about each other, the resulting emergent system displays complex behaviors, which allow the ants
to gather food. Or, here's the classic Conway's Game of Life.
Way back in high school I did a series of science fair projects
modeling biological processes.
modeling biological processes, and all three projects are now available online, ported from the original RealBASIC by Claude. Check out simulations of
species migration and the effects of forest fragmentation (1999),
sympatric speciation in hypothetical Darwin's finches (2000), and
artificial evolution of adorable little mass-spring creatures that run across your screen (2001), which got me to the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in San Jose.
Professionally,
I consult.
I consult on startup and non-profit strategy, deep tech, and software engineering.
I work primarily in aerospace, climate, and energy tech. I started and ran the Astera Institute climate grant program for two years. Previously, I was on the founding team at Vast Space working on a commercial space station. Before that, I led technical development of Major Tom, a modern mission control system for small satellites. Further back, I was Chief Architect at Mavenlink, where I wrote a lot of code and built
the engineering team.
the engineering team, applying
agile practices to
agile software development practices that I learned as a consultant at Pivotal Labs, including rigorous testing, continuous
integration, and sometimes TDD & pair programming, to
frontend and
backend web development.
backend web development with
Ruby
Ruby both on and off Rails
and various
DevOps tools.
strange 3-4 letter UNIX commands in containers and K8s clusters.
I often use machine learning.
I often use machine learning, including LLMs and sometimes more traditional techniques. Way back in 2012, I gave a talk at RailsConf about machine learning in Ruby and originally studied it
in graduate school.
while doing my Master's research at Georgia Tech. My research focused on
artificial intelligence,
artificial intelligence. Specifically, I researched TTD-MDPs, a technique for generating a distribution of trajectories through a Markov Decision Process.
With my co-authors I published a couple of
papers.
papers:
David L. Roberts, Andrew S. Cantino, and Charles L. Isbell. Player Autonomy versus Designer Intent: A Case Study of Interactive Tour Guides. In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-07), Palo Alto, California, 2007.
Andrew Cantino, David L. Roberts, and Charles L. Isbell. Autonomous Nondeterministic Tour Guides: Improving Quality of Experience with TTD-MDPs. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-07), Honolulu, Hawai'i, 2007.
I also researched
stochastic optimization
stochastic optimization for motion control of high degree-of-freedom manipulators, like octopus arms and elephant trunks (you can read my paper about it),
and machine learning in web applications.
Prior to Georgia Tech, I graduated from Haverford College with a BS in
Physics.
Physics and a concentration in Computational Science, which focused on
Physics Education.
Physics Education. This culminated in the development of three educational physics applets
that are featured in the Physics textbook Waves and Oscillations: A Prelude to Quantum Mechanics by Walter Smith.
Before that, I developed a low-cost, distributed data-processing cluster to search for radio pulsar signals.
I'm
also an entrepreneur.
a co-founder of Overview Energy, a VC-backed startup building space energy for Earth.
I enjoy creating
open source software and writing
open source software, some of which includes:
- McFly - Fast, full-screen Bash/Zsh/Fish history search in Rust, prioritized with a tiny neural network (7,000 stars on GitHub)
- Huginn - A system for building agents that monitor the world and act on your behalf (now with 48,000 stars on GitHub!)
- SelectorGadget - A tool for easy CSS selector generation
- MyObfuscate - Ruby stream processor for rewriting SQL dumps to protect user privacy
- Brainstem - a framework for building powerful Rails APIs (see my RailsConf 2013 talk)
- ruby-readability - Ruby port of Readability, a tool for extracting text from webpages
- twitter_to_csv - Consume and process Twitter streams (used for a JAMA Dermatology paper)
- Reckon - Bayesian learning Ruby gem for command line accounting with Ledger
- The Cursed Puzzle - A Mac Plus shareware game that I made in 1996 when I was about 13, now playable in your browser
- Expando - The expanding text jQuery plugin that powers this page