Neil Kalman
Software Engineer, Web Developer, and Project Manager in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel
Computer programmer, and game designer, as well as a musician & saxophone player. Neil also did some work in the MAKER community. The common link here: Neil knows how to make things work.
Based in Tel-Aviv, Israel, he currently works as a Front-End Engineer and UI developer with Amdocs, which offers software & services for service providers in the communications, media and entertainment industries.
For more than a decade, he has taught Classical & Jazz Saxophone, as well as the art of Jazz Improvisation.
As a professional musician and sax player, Neil has played with Israeli Artists such as the Israeli Air Force Orchestra, David Broza, Ohad Hitman, Guy Mazig and Idan Alterman.
Focused on Jazz and Avant-Garde—he is currently performing with the likes of Carmel Apple Pop, Igor Krutogolov's Karate Band and Pancho.
And as a Music Instructor, Neil served for four years as an Assistant Conductor with Kfar-Saba's youth Big Band, where he specialized in the fundamentals of jazz articulation, “jazz feel” and improvisation. There, he conducted an orchestra of 20+ high-school students and mentored intimate groups.
He has also worked as a Research Assistant for Dr. Itay Mayrose’s Lab at the Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants, He was charged with development and research for the study on the relation between molecular evolution rates & specification rates in Phylogenetic trees.
Among personal software technical projects he engaged himself with, Neil programmed and build of a fully functional American-style Arcade Machine, which emulates such consoles as MAME, Neo Geo, Nintendo DS, MS-DOS, GameBoy, Gameboy Advanced, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, and Sony Playstation 1. Neil’s tasks included writing a launch script for each console utilizing AutoHotkey, while mapping X-Arcade controls and Xbox 360 wireless controllers.
As part of a Workshop in Computer Science supervised by Prof. Roded Sharan, he worked on the analysis of Biological Networks using a Constrained Fuzzy Logic model. In this role, Neil implemented evolutionary algorithms and local minima avoidance strategies to achieve well-approximating solutions.
On the opposite side of the technical spectrum, Neil made some guest appearances on TV and live comic venues:
“Israeli Bref” with Vanya Heyman and Roy Kafri; A.D.I., a video clip for Adi Ulmansky, directed by Vanya Heyman; and a sketch for stan