[About me]
Email me on contact[at]lenkaspace[dot]net
I was born in eastern Slovakia on 26th June 1988 where I attended an academically oriented grammar school for 8 years. I was interested in creating computer software since I was a child and I started with simple games and short cartoons in Power Point. Discovering Flash 5 and ActionScript when I was 14 was a great marvel to me since I saw an opportunity to finally make 'real stuff'. Soon afterwards I made a few demos and became a developer and administrator of my school web site. I stayed in Slovakia until the age of 18 when I was accepted at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton, UK after passing an English test.
I started studying Computer Graphics since I had no clear career path in my mind. We had some programming in Pascal at my high school and it was the only thing I could do right anyways (well probably apart from drawing and playing guitar which didn't seem that promising as a career).
After the first year at the University I realised that programming interested me much more than graphics, so I decided to change my course to Computer Games Development. Two exciting years followed when I created a couple of 2D and 3D games as my course assignments, some of them in teams with my classmates.
I also got a job through the University career centre as a freelance Flash developer for New Generation Web sites, a company from St. Albans. I am very grateful to Jan and Tony who helped me to become a professional in this field. I continued my freelance web site and application development with NGW and other companies for about 4 years. Early in 2009 I created brand RedCrystal Studios and added iPhone development to my repertoire.
It was only at the beginning of the 3rd year of my undergraduate studies that I decided to precede with studying and specialise in AI. My undergraduate project was a game called Alien Farm that borrowed some ideas from strategy games and A-life simulations. It was a great success amongst my peers as well as academic staff and my first real debut in the field of artificial intelligence. I finished my undergraduate with First Class BSc Hons in Games Development.
In summer 2009 I got accepted at the University of Sussex for an MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems and I moved to Brighton. Early in 2010 I was also employed by a local software development company Encore that later became a part of worldwide group Edelman Digital. The work was very programming-and research- heavy and I had an opportunity to learn from senior developers and to extend my knowledge of ActionScript, Java, PHP, Objective-C and other languages. I left the company in summer 2011 and started working from home for Hurst MailAgent, which gave me an opportunity to concentrate better on finishing my masters dissertation.
I set out to explore properties and usefulness of ultrastability in a robot controller that used hormones as a function-based action selection mechanism, which reflected my growing interested in biologically inspired parallel computing that I acquired at Sussex. I left Sussex with MSc with Distinction and took a gap year before continuing to my PhD in Simulation of Complex Systems at the University of Southampton.
After receiving my PhD, with thesis title "Design Patterns for Robot Swarms", I obtained a year-long funding from the University of Southampton, which allowed me to continue my work with robot swarms at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. While there, I also joined the Robotics for Nuclear Environments project. Early in 2018, I became a Research Associate in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Bristol, working on the Thales-Bristol Partnership in Hybrid Autonomous Systems Engineering (T-B PHASE) project.
I was born in eastern Slovakia on 26th June 1988 where I attended an academically oriented grammar school for 8 years. I was interested in creating computer software since I was a child and I started with simple games and short cartoons in Power Point. Discovering Flash 5 and ActionScript when I was 14 was a great marvel to me since I saw an opportunity to finally make 'real stuff'. Soon afterwards I made a few demos and became a developer and administrator of my school web site. I stayed in Slovakia until the age of 18 when I was accepted at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton, UK after passing an English test.I started studying Computer Graphics since I had no clear career path in my mind. We had some programming in Pascal at my high school and it was the only thing I could do right anyways (well probably apart from drawing and playing guitar which didn't seem that promising as a career).
After the first year at the University I realised that programming interested me much more than graphics, so I decided to change my course to Computer Games Development. Two exciting years followed when I created a couple of 2D and 3D games as my course assignments, some of them in teams with my classmates.I also got a job through the University career centre as a freelance Flash developer for New Generation Web sites, a company from St. Albans. I am very grateful to Jan and Tony who helped me to become a professional in this field. I continued my freelance web site and application development with NGW and other companies for about 4 years. Early in 2009 I created brand RedCrystal Studios and added iPhone development to my repertoire.
It was only at the beginning of the 3rd year of my undergraduate studies that I decided to precede with studying and specialise in AI. My undergraduate project was a game called Alien Farm that borrowed some ideas from strategy games and A-life simulations. It was a great success amongst my peers as well as academic staff and my first real debut in the field of artificial intelligence. I finished my undergraduate with First Class BSc Hons in Games Development.In summer 2009 I got accepted at the University of Sussex for an MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems and I moved to Brighton. Early in 2010 I was also employed by a local software development company Encore that later became a part of worldwide group Edelman Digital. The work was very programming-and research- heavy and I had an opportunity to learn from senior developers and to extend my knowledge of ActionScript, Java, PHP, Objective-C and other languages. I left the company in summer 2011 and started working from home for Hurst MailAgent, which gave me an opportunity to concentrate better on finishing my masters dissertation.
I set out to explore properties and usefulness of ultrastability in a robot controller that used hormones as a function-based action selection mechanism, which reflected my growing interested in biologically inspired parallel computing that I acquired at Sussex. I left Sussex with MSc with Distinction and took a gap year before continuing to my PhD in Simulation of Complex Systems at the University of Southampton.After receiving my PhD, with thesis title "Design Patterns for Robot Swarms", I obtained a year-long funding from the University of Southampton, which allowed me to continue my work with robot swarms at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. While there, I also joined the Robotics for Nuclear Environments project. Early in 2018, I became a Research Associate in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Bristol, working on the Thales-Bristol Partnership in Hybrid Autonomous Systems Engineering (T-B PHASE) project.
