Raphael Kim

What I bring to a team

I work across the boundaries where a promising demo becomes a usable system: interaction, orchestration, inference, persistent state, embedded hardware and deployment. I can define an experience, make the technical choices and build the pieces that let someone actually use it.

The projects here originate in my own concepts and design work. I take them through implementation and iteration; professional contexts and team contributions are identified where relevant.

Built in different contexts

• Snips / Sonos — voice and product prototyping. Contributed to the product definition and UX specification of Sonos Voice Control. Conceived and built contextual listening prototypes spanning interaction, lyrics retrieval, sensing and ESP32 firmware.
• SAP — collaboration. Conceived the idea, built the prototype and developed the OS X application within the Chairman’s project team. The concept later evolved into CoScreen.
• MIT Media Lab — physical interaction. Created SPrAyCE, a spray-based interface for drawing in mid-air, connecting a physical gesture to digital creation.
• Independent R&D — AI systems. Design, build and operate the local inference, voice services, agent integrations and interfaces behind the projects in this portfolio.

How I build

Start with a use case. Make the whole loop work. Then find the weak boundaries: ambiguous requests, missing context, unavailable services, unsafe actions and outputs that cannot be verified.

I use models where interpretation or generation helps, and explicit software contracts where correctness matters. That can mean a source-backed answer, a reviewed diff, an event ledger or a hardware control loop that keeps working without the model.