CV

Profile

I’m Head of Research for a large software visualization company. I have thirteen years commercial experience of software design and development through all stages of the product life-cycle, using a variety of technologies. I have a strong academic and research background in mathematics, theoretical physics and computing.

Professional Experience

I’ve worked for i2 for the last eleven years. i2 produce visualisation and analysis software designed for intelligence and crime analysts in high profile intelligence agencies, the military and law enforcement. The company has grown fast over the years, from around 30 people when I joined to around 350 now. I’ve had several roles.

2010- Head of Research

As below, but now I have line management responsibilities for four senior researchers & a remit over the whole company, including recent acquisitions.

2007-2009  Research Lead

I run the company’s research team.  Responsibilities include:

  • Defining the research direction for the company
  • Line management of senior researchers
  • Building relationships with the academic visualisation community
  • Speaking on behalf of the company at conferences
  • Building prototypes and demonstration systems for future development
  • High level technical account management with key customers

In 2009 I concentrated on building relationships on behalf of the company. I’ve been invited to speak at several large conferences, and I lead technical accounts with several customers in the intelligence world. At the same time also I’m happy to say that several research projects from my team have shipped in products and given the company commercial advantage. My own research moved towards pure Javascript & HTML5 canvas implementations.

In 2008 I defined and built a prototype web-based visualisation system. I lead a team of 3-7 people over the year. We built the system using both Flex/Flash and Silverlight with Java server-side with an ATOM/REST style service interface. The project innovated in many areas, not just application delivery, but also in terms of collaboration features, visual design and information architecture. The company now has a product in development which uses Silverlight.

In 2007 I coordinated a research proposal for €3.5 million under the EU FP7 programme. The consortium was made up of i2, two Italian universities, SAP, a Czech company and Europol. The bid was very nearly successful & scored highly on the areas I had direct responsibility for – the technical component.

2004-2007 Lead Technical Architect

  • Technical leadership of projects
  • Impact assessments of new technologies
  • Development standards and procedures
  • Architecture reviews of large projects

I readied the company for the arrival of Vista and the wider adoption of virtualization technologies like VMWare. I put into place various development guidelines: from the evaluation of 3rd party software, to performance best practices, to standards concerned with reduced user privileges & other aspects of Windows in the enterprise.

During 2005-2006 I was a technical lead for a .NET project of 5-8 people. This involved design and review work, requirements ownership of some key areas, putting processes in place, some management activities and some coding.

In 2004 I worked on a semantic infrastructure project with the CTO. I designed and implemented (in C++) a ‘semantic’ layer which pushes through all of i2′s products. Data is marked with semantic ‘tags’ which allows the software some understanding of what it represents. I still own the infrastructure support & thought-leadership for this.

1998-2003 Senior Developer

I worked for five years on i2’s flagship product – a Windows application written using MFC which allows customisation through a large COM API.

I designed and implemented a major new version which incorporated new temporal visualisations for intelligence analysts, which included:

  • Presentations, workshops with key stakeholders, gathering
    requirements & owning requirements lists
  • Design of the new project, including time analysis features
  • Rewriting large sections of core libraries to incorporate new
    functionality
  • C++ implementation of core algorithms, using fun data structures
    such as skip-lists
  • Development team lead
  • API Design
  • Awareness of legacy issues, localisation issues, process things,
    user expectations, etc.

1996–1998 Metron Technology Ltd  Development Specialist

I designed a product which used mathematical modelling (queueing theory) to predict end-to-end response times in Client-Server systems. The product is still sold today. The project was funded via a DTI SPUR grant for the commercial exploitation of research.

Development

I do less active development than I used to, and more design and architecture work. Having said that, I do make sure I read and write code on a daily basis for all the projects I’m involved with.

Language skills:

  • C++ (COM, MFC) – five years
  • C#, .NET – three years
  • VB – two years
  • Adobe Flash/Flex – Actionscript – one year
  • Python – just starting
  • JavaScript – just starting

Education

M.Sc. in Computer Science (Distinction) Imperial College, London University 1995-1996

Options: Performance Analysis, C++ and OOD, Databases, Graphics, Algorithms & Reasoning. Dissertation found a new algorithm for measuring fractal dimension.

Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics, King’s College, Cambridge 1990-1994

Member of Stephen Hawking’s research group. Thesis on perturbations of space-time in the early universe. Papers presented in Paris, London and Tokyo.

Part III Mathematics (Distinction), King’s College, Cambridge 1989-1990

Courses: Numerical Analysis, Cosmology, Black Holes, etc. Scholar of King’s College.

B.Sc. (Hons) in Mathematics (1st Class), Bristol University 1986-1989

Numerical Analysis, Fluid Dynamics and other Applied Mathematics courses.

Publications

Miscellaneous

  • UK National
  • Full Driving License

References

  • On Request

0 Responses to “CV”

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address
  • No Comments

Leave a Reply