languages / operating systems

development tools and environments

hardware

experience

JUNE 2001 TO DATE
Human Interface Prototypes (headquartered at 10150 Waynecrest Lane, Santee, CA 92071), a technical services company, as president and sole proprietor, engaged in the following projects, and wrote C and Java code in support of each deliverable:

• For client Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), produced visualizations of the on-line multi-player game America's Army showing player interaction and team trends mined from gigabytes of server log files.
• For client Mindtel, LLC, produced a web site combining geographical, cultural and historical data on the Mojave Desert.
• For client National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), produced visualizations for research into the display of bio-terrorism threats and other geographically-based public health information, as well as the display of large-dataset cultural intelligence data.
• For client BIOwulf Technologies, produced a video to explain the technology of Support Vector Machines (SVM) artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.
• Currently completing a book, A Survival Guide for the Traveling Techie, to be published in 2004.

JULY 1998 TO MARCH 2001
OrderFusion, Inc. (headquartered at 10180 Telesis Court, San Diego, CA 92121), formerly
Dover Pacific Computing, Inc., a producer of client/server and Web-based sell-side business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce software, as sales support engineer at the San Diego headquarters served as a corporate resource and "technical guru" for all field pre-sales engineers, answered the tough questions, wrote the tricky demos, responded to RFPs, gave presentations and demonstrations to prospects making HQ visits, and trained all new field sales engineers (SEs), also had responsibility for creating and upgrading all corporate product demos, and for configuring and maintaining all corporate office and trade show demo computers; also served as a stand-by SE during peak times of field sales requirements; as sales engineer, wrote customized demo programs, gave product presentations and demonstrations, and provided other pre-sales technical support. During my two and a half years with the company we were named "best of breed" sell-side B2B software by the Gartner and Meta groups, went through two successful rounds of venture capital funding, and achieved five-fold growth in revenue and employees.

FEBRUARY 1998 TO JUNE 1998
AP Labs (headquartered at 5871 Oberlin Dr., San Diego, CA 92121), a manufacturer of ruggedized high-speed data acquisition equipment for avionics, equipped with visually programmed software front-ends, as senior software engineer at the San Diego headquarters maintained and ported UNIX/Motif code to other UNIX flavors as well as re-implementing in Java for Windows NT. Debugged and ported visualization packages based on PV-Wave and DataViews.

NOVEMBER 1996 TO NOVEMBER 1997
Apple Computer Inc.'s Enterprise Software Division (headquartered at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014), formerly
NeXT Software Inc. , a producer of object-oriented software tools for enterprise client/server and intranet/internet applications, as systems engineer (pre-sales) in the Irvine sales office (18301 Von Karman, Suite 1000, Irvine, CA 92612) provided technical support for sales teams calling on large commercial accounts selling WebObjects and OpenStep application development tools (for Java, Objective C, C++ and C), and operating systems software, developed by NeXT. Job evaluation and bonus compensation based on software revenue in the western region of North America; after joining Apple this region produced strong revenue and growth during the last 3 quarters of Apple's fiscal '97 (ending in September 1997), contributing to WebObjects being rated the number one enterprise intranet tool by IDC. This ex-NeXT software revenue also contributed to the Apple recovery, and the doubling of Apple's stock value during the same period.

APRIL 1996 TO NOVEMBER 1996
Object|FX Corporation (headquartered at 2515 Wabash Ave., Suite 100, St. Paul, MN 55114), a producer of object-oriented geospatial visualization tools for client/server and World Wide Web (WWW), as systems engineer (pre-sales) in the Irvine sales office (2030 Main Street, Suite 1300, Irvine, CA 92614) provided technical support for SmallTalk-based software development tools for Geographical Information System (GIS) functionality as application components in network environments connecting desktop clients to database servers.

AUGUST 1992 TO APRIL 1996
Advanced Visual Systems, Inc. (headquartered at 300 Fifth Ave., Waltham, MA 02154) , a visualization software producer: as systems engineer (pre-sales) in the Irvine sales office (2102 Business Center Court, Suite 130 Irvine, CA 92715) provided technical support for salespeople of 3D graphics software development tools (for C and C++) for UNIX and PC deployments. Duties included UNIX, Mac and Windows system administration, programming and operating demos, technical presentations and assisting customers with software design and debugging. Job success was measured by sales in the southwest US. In 1994 the salesperson I supported made the biggest sale in company history ($1.8 million) and in 1995 that salesperson was highest over quota (110%).

JANUARY 1992 TO AUGUST 1992
Kubota Pacific Computer Inc. (headquartered at 2630 Walsh Ave., Santa Clara, CA 95051) a manufacturer of graphics supercomputers: as senior systems analyst (pre-sales) in the Santa Monica sales office (120 Broadway, Suite 203, Santa Monica, CA 90401) ported and tuned prospects' computational benchmarks in FORTRAN and C for performance on a symmetric multiprocessor architecture with vector math unit, used prospect data in scientific visualization demos, wrote graphics demo programs, prepared and gave technical sales presentations and customer training sessions, planned and executed trade and road shows, administered office/road demo systems, and wrote RFQ technical responses. I was hand-picked for this job out of a field of 6 western SEs, when Kubota purchased the Stardent hardware line.

FEBRUARY 1988 TO DECEMBER 1991
Stardent Computer Inc. (headquartered at 85 Wells Ave., Newton, MA 01581), a manufacturer of graphics supercomputers: as senior systems analyst (pre-sales) in the Los Angeles sales office (5757 Century Blvd., Suite 450, Los Angeles, CA 90045) duties identical to Kubota (above); was voted systems analyst of the year for western U.S. two out of three years and sent with spouse to Sales Club.

OCTOBER 1985 TO FEBRUARY 1988
Rockwell International's Space Station Systems Division (12214 Lakewood Blvd., Downey, CA 90241), a manufacturer of manned space vehicles: as consulting programmer working with a colleague (P. Mercurio) designed and implemented an interactive key-frame animation package in C to run on a real- time 3-D graphics system; as staff computer graphics programmer at the Downey facility designed and implemented software tools in C and used these tools to produce simulations and videotapes of space station assembly as well as other space vehicles and mechanisms.

JANUARY 1983 TO MAY 1985
GTI Corporation's Computer Graphics Division (10060 Willow Creek Rd., San Diego, CA 92131), a manufacturer of real-time 3-D interactive graphics systems: as applications engineer (pre- and post-sales) at the San Diego headquarters worked with customers to resolve graphics software problems, wrote graphics demo programs and gave presentations with them; as software project leader wrote specifications for the user interface to graphics system software, managed software development teams to implement, enhance and maintain internal real-time software of graphics systems; and as documentation manager hired and trained technical writers for hardware and software and established documentation guidelines and version numbering systems.

offices / publications

• August 1998 to date: Chair of the San Diego Chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH (the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics).
• North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science (NAACSOS) June 2004: paper: Experiments in Visualizing Social Networks.
• July 2003 Chair of SIGKIDS San Diego 2003
  
  
• ACM SIGGRAPH 1995: Special Interest Group (SIG): "AVS In Medicine" (chaired)
  
  
• ACM SIGGRAPH 1994: technical sketch: Architecting AVS Express (with J. Vroom)
  
• ACM SIGGRAPH 1994: SIG panel: "The Virtual Actor and the Human Factor" (chaired)
  
  
• Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 1994: paper: The Impact of Visual Programming In Medical Research.
  
  
• ACM SIGGRAPH 1993: panel: "Electronic Image and Popular Discourse" (Benjamin Bratton, chair); topic: Hypertext or Game Boy: We Are At a Fork In the Road.
  
  
• AVS '93 (International User Group): paper: The Nature of Scientific Visualization.
• Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 1992: paper: The Somascope: A Tool For Guided Self-Healing Using Medical Imaging.
• Federal Computer Conference 1991: panel: "Visualization and Simulation" (Richard Friedhoff, chair); topic: A History of Scientific Visualization.
  
  
• ACM SIGGRAPH 1991: technical coordinator of Tomorrow's Realities Gallery (juried multimedia and virtual reality exhibits) .
• Geological Society of America Abstr. Progr., Cordilleran Section., 23, 56, 1991: paper: Interactive Scientific Visualization in the Geological Sciences: A New Dimension of the Imagination for Geologic Education and Advanced Research by Dr. Eric G. Frost, Lisa A. Heizer, Tammy L. Tatum, William C. Vanek, and Alan B. Scrivener

training

• Enterprise Objects for the Web (WebObjects and SQL databases) by NeXT Software Inc. (1 week)
• Introduction to Web Objects by NeXT Software Inc. (1 week)
• Introduction to SmallTalk by Parc Place, Inc. (1 week)
• C++ Programming in-house training by Clarity Learning Inc. for AVS Inc. (1 week)
• X Windows Programming (2 days) at University of California at Irvine (UCI) Extension
• Linear Systems Analysis (2 hrs/week for 10 weeks) at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Extension
• Neuroscience for Physicists, Mathematicians and Engineers (UCLA Kineseology 197) audited by permission of Dr. Alan Garfinkel, world expert on cardiac chaos (4 hrs/week for 13 weeks)

education