Industry Related Work
I have learned quite a bit about three different domains now. I know how
airline pricing and ticketing work, how the healthcare process works in
relation to computing, and how industrial controls are used and programmed.
These will help me develop domain examples for my research, and provide
solid engineering experience from which to draw. While these experiences
are not directly relevant to my future employment, it does give a flavor of
the kinds of industrial jobs I held outside of my time at school. Below is
a summary of the major work I have done in industry in reverse chronological
order:
- Worldspan. I did a summer internship with them. Instead of performing
traditional research activities, I performed traditional engineering
activites. The short of it is that they have 60 MB of source code and
needed someone to go through the system and try to figure out how to improve
performance. After learning the domain, I discovered some gross inefficiencies
in their query engine. In order to fix those inefficiencies, I had to fix the
memory management. That consisted of forcing the system to actually clean up
dynamically allocated memory and adding a custom memory allocator for large
(> 4KB) memory blocks. I then change the query engine process to run
perpetually avoiding the load times. In spite of the memory management
additional work, there was a measured 0.1 second improvement on a 2.5 second
average task. The savings for making the engine perpetual were not directly
measurable due to where and how the timings were collected (load times were
ignored previously even though there are 50+ DLLs that are loaded each time).
The changes allowed the query process to run and provided memory management
mechanisms to improve the functioning of the data preprocessing system.
- McKesson Information Systems. Started by creating a system to perform
database trigger-like functionality outside of the database for data analysis
and alerting. Next, spent a year teaching employees about C++ and Windows
Programming. Then spent a year helping building a team and doing the vast
majority of the architecture, design, and coding of a web-based application
integration platform to bring together the data and functionality from the
various departmental systems onto a single screen, the "portal" as it is known.
The user could reconfigure what they saw and how it was displayed according to
their desires. As a follow-on and extension, I helped create a consulting team
for the portal project and created a forms processing system using XML, XSLT,
and XSLFO. I found out that as of Fall 2004, the portal project that was
completed in December 2000 and really started to be rolled out in Spring 2001
has generated $93 million in profit so far and is still going strong. They
also reached the 1 millionith login!
- Siemens Energy and Automation. Helped create program editors for graphical
languages for programming industrial controls. Lived in Germany for 1 year as
part of the work. When I returned, I created a visualization layer for a
software-based controller that could be used transparently for both testing and
as a live controller (with some I/O hardware). Also had the "fun" of doing a
Visual Basic for Applications pilot integration for the Microsoft rollout at
Comdex.
- Undergradate Coop with Palmer and Associates. Worked on a system to automate
New England Electrical Systems' service paperwork system.
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Last Modified: Nov. 19, 2004