About

Hi, I’m Tom Madams and this is my blog.

I currently work at Sony Interactive Entertainment on their Tools & Technology group.

Some of the more interesting things I’ve been lucky enough to work on in the past:

• At Google:
  • Wrote the C++ engine for Minigo, an open-source implementation of the AlphaGo Zero algorithm. Minigo is currently the reinforcement learning benchmark in the MLPerf suite, and is also available as a demo for Google’s Coral Edge TPU accelerator.
  • Built the Google-side data ingestion pipeline for a collaboration between Google and TAE Technologies, a clean energy company working towards building a commercially viable plasma fusion reactor.
  • A small contribution to a much larger effort to automatically diagnose diabetic retinopathy using machine learning (I wrote the tool used to annotate retina photographs). The corresponding research paper was named by The Journal of the American Medical Association as one of the ten most important medical papers of the decade, which was pretty cool.
  • Spent a few years on the search infrastructure team, where I rewrote the intra-corpus result reranking framework that had lasted from Google’s early “10 blue links” days.
• At LucasArts:
  • Worked on the asset packing & streaming system, and wrote a new decal system for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II.
  • Collaborated with LucasFilm engineers to prototype a realtime, low-latency motion capture preview system leveraging the LucasArts game engine.
  • Also worked on a couple of unreleased titles.
• At Sony’s London Studio (then, Team Soho):
  • Wrote the traffic system for The Getaway and its sequel, The Getaway: Black Monday. I also took ownership of the graphics engine after the original author left the company and added a number of features, optimizations and effects.
  • Was one of the rendering engineers for an unreleased PlayStation 3 iteration of The Getaway. The highlight of that somewhat difficult time was building a demo for the PlayStation 3 reveal at E3 2005.