At Amdocs Media, I led a team modernizing a media servicing automation platform that services large studios like Warner Bros and MGM. The operational environment was very fast-paced, and my role required strong relationships across all layers of our organization, including software engineering, content engineering, production support, client services, and IT operations. I thrive when confronted with challenging technical problems that require managing uncertainty and commitment despite high visibility with stakeholders through the planning, implementation and delivery process.

Earlier I worked as a senior software developer for a startup engaged in delivering intelligent automation to a variety of industry problems. The team has its roots in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Beyond Limits is focused largely on designing and developing products and services for industrial applications in Internet of Things (IoT) as well platforms for agents that can reason, learn as well as deal with uncertainty. At Beyond Limits, I developed an innovative decision-support software agent that helped judge production risk in current and future oil wells using a variety of available data and knowledge. Previously, I had architected, developed and deployed a flexible conversational agent that interfaced to a natural language information retrieval agent providing a more natural dialogue experience to users in a healthcare context. The agent employed several components for stateful dialogue management, user intent determination and entity extraction (e.g. "9 am would work best for me")

Prior to Beyond Limits, I led a research group developing the SimCoach virtual human platform at ICT, used to build interactive applications to support a variety of domains including healthcare, training, career management and coaching. My current focus is on the launch of the USC Standard Patient system which aims to provide medical educators the means to supplement human standardized patient training with virtual analogues. Previously, I led the development of a creational toolset called Roundtable with the goal to make building interactive virtual humans more accessible using a software as a service (Saas) approach. Earlier at ICT I was the technical lead on the BiLAT negotiation and resilience training systems--the former a U.S. Army Simulation of the Year in 2008.

With over twenty years of experience in developing complex software systems of varying scales, I have acquired a flexible skillset to approach many sort of problems and application domains. Before joining ICT, I was a senior systems engineer at the MITRE Corporation's Air Force Center, with projects that included the development of human-oriented virtual trainers, decision support systems and solutions to improve information operations across command and control battle environments for the U.S. Air Force's Electronic System's Center. I graduated from Bowdoin College in 2000 and received two B.A. degrees in Computer Science and Neuroscience.

My goal is to take on exciting and challenging engineering leadership positions, either as individual contributor or architect, in an organization developing innovative end-user applications and products. I wish to diversify from experience primarily rooted in technology research.

• USC Standard Patient
• SimCoach
• Roundtable

USC Standard Patient

This project represents a significant advancement in medical training for medical students, residents, continuing medical education and medical educators. Virtual standard patients (VSP) are virtual human interactive agents that support, through natural language processing, the practice of medical patient interviews. These patients can answer your medical questions, tell their narrative stories and coupled with a feedback system, provide automated feedback that allows improvement of your performance.

In addition to a platform targetting new and continuing students of medicine, USC Standard Patient also makes available a full creational studio, where medical educators can craft new VSPs with minimal effort. The system is in an early beta stage and is being made available to medical educators and others in the community.

 http://www.standardpatient.org

 For additional information

SimCoach

SimCoach is a virtual human support agent prototype serving military personnel and family members in breaking down barriers to initiating the healthcare process. The agent is designed to motivate users to take the first step and seek information and advice with regard to their mental health and general personal welfare. If determined necessary, a SimCoach agent will also encourage them to take the next step towards seeking more traditional resources available. The SimCoach project is not conceived to deliver diagnosis or treatment, or as a replacement for human providers and experts.

SimCoach allows users to engage in a natural language dialog about their healthcare concerns with an interactive virtual human. The coach will answer direct questions and guide the user through a sequence of user-specific exercises and assessments. While a research prototype, the technology presents a compelling opportunity for more task-focused digital coaches for many different task domains benefiting from an empathetic and encouraging agent. The system utilizes state of the art approaches in natural language processing (NLP), dialogue management and 3D character animation.

 http://www.simcoach.org

 For additional information

Roundtable

Roundtable is a sandbox that allows anybody to create and test conversational virtual characters. It is built upon a virtual human platform developed for a system called SimCoach. It builds upon a set of technologies developed at USC's Institute of Creative Technologies, while reshaping them into a web-based, software-as-a-service platform. Early on in the effort, we envisioned a toolset that would make it easier to create, test and deploy conversational virtual humans on the ubiquitous medium of the web. The authoring system has been made available publicly for research use.

 SIGDIAL 2013 Conference Demo

Please find a more complete portfolio at my flickr photostream