Christopher Baker
Senior Principal Engineer at Shield AI
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChristopher Baker is a Senior Principal Engineer and interdisciplinary artist with 15+ years blending art, interaction design, and systems engineering to reveal social and technological networks. Based in Boulder, he leads special projects in Shield AI’s Office of the CTO and previously commanded Hivemind R&D, applying creative research practices to complex, real-world autonomy problems. His background spans academia—former Associate Professor at SAIC and visiting roles at Kitchen Budapest—and an independent studio, Murmur Labs, where he produces installations, visualization, and physical-computing work. A seasoned C++ and embedded-systems contributor, he has improved cross-platform libraries like POCO and the popular ofxFaceTracker addon, showing fluency from low-level serial implementations to interactive media frameworks. Baker’s practice-driven technical leadership is unusual in combining museum- and festival-grade art exposure with production-grade open-source fixes and platform compatibility work. He holds an MFA and MS from the University of Minnesota and brings a design-first sensibility to engineering problems that require both rigorous systems thinking and inventive prototyping.
15 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
MFA, MFA at University of MinnesotaB.S., B.S. at Saint Louis University
Stackoverflow
924reputation
54kreached
27answers
0questions
Github Skills (28)
c-language10
unix10
multiplatform10
windows10
cross-platform10
networking10
openframeworks10
cplus10
computer-vision10
macos10
cpp10
serial-communication10
cprogramming-language10
http-server9
glm9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
kylemcdonald/ofxFaceTracker
Oct 2015 - Feb 2018
CLM face tracking addon for openFrameworks based on Jason Saragih's FaceTracker.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 2 PRs, 1 comment in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Christopher primarily focused on updating the codebase to be compatible with newer versions of the underlying framework, openFrameworks (oF), by modifying existing code and updating scripts. They adapted various examples and scripts for oF 0.10.0+ compatibility, including changes in header files and source files. These changes include updates to the code and data structures. Additionally, the user addressed build warnings and replaced deprecated functionalities.
facetrackertrackingface-trackingopenframeworksaddon
wjwwood/serial
Oct 2013 - Oct 2016
Cross-platform, Serial Port library written in C++
Role in this project:Back-end & Embedded Systems Engineer
Back-end & Embedded Systems EngineerContributions:10 commits, 1 PR, 2 comments in 3 years
Contributions summary:Christopher primarily contributed to platform-specific implementations of the serial port library, focusing on Unix, Windows, and OSX environments. Their work included fixing broken ioctl calls, adding exception handling, and adding support for new list_ports methods. They also addressed cross-platform compatibility issues and made const corrections to improve code quality.
cppserial-portsserialserialportlinux
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