Career Highlights
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I'm currently a Sr. Staff Software Engineer at Digimarc Corporation,
a software development company in Beaverton, Oregon. Digimarc is the leading developer
of digital watermarking technologies in the world and we have some really creative
and extensive intellectual property in this area. Our patented technologies can allow digital
data to be imperceptibly embedded in traditional and digital video
and audio content, including television, movies, music, photographic or artistic images,
and valuable documents such as financial instruments, passports and event tickets. These technologies are used in a wide
variety of applications, including solutions that identify, track and monetize assets, as well as deter counterfeiting, piracy and
other unauthorized uses. I work for the commercial applications group at Digimarc and am currently
working on an exciting new product initiative involving content identification.
I have worked for Digimarc for over eight years in total starting in June of 2000,
but left for a year during 2006 and 2007 to work at a small startup in Portland,
Oregon
called Eid Passport.
Eid Passport:
Eid is in the business
of secured facility access, concentrating mostly on the military. One
of the most interesting aspects of Eid is their very unique business model. Instead
of selling the security product directly to military facilities they instead pass
the cost on to the vendors and their employees that want access to the facility.
The military pays a rediculously small fee to have the equipment installed and maintained
and reaps the benefits of the system by requiring vendors to register for a credential
associated with the system. It's a creative model that makes it very easy for
cash poor military installations to utilize a very robust secured entry system.
The RAPIDGate product is made up of three main components, a Registration system,
an Enforcement system and a backend Datacenter. The Registration and Enforcement
systems comprise what are considered the client side of the product and is where
I concentrated my efforts.
The company was going through significant
growth during my tenure and I believe I helped establish some meaningful process
and stability into the development side of client engineering group.
While at Eid I worked as a Senior Software Engineer and then Engineering Manager
for the client group.
My major focus was on the design and implementation of a new architecture for the
handheld communication portion of the enforcement system. We moved from a proprietary
protocol to a more open web services based design. At the
same time we entirely rearchitected the software running on
the handheld to abstract
away all of the hardware dependencies in an effort to become much more handheld agnostic. This made it much easier to migrate the software to new handhelds moving
forward in an ever-evolving handheld market. We also redesigned the biometric verification
subsystem to utilize new and more robust 3rd party algorithms on the server side
of the enforcement system. The new design opened up much more flexibility on where
the verification occurs and what algorithms are used.
Digimarc - Round One:
I originally joined Digimarc in June of 2000 after moving to Oregon from New Hampshire. I was
one of a number application developers working to find creative ways to
apply the
company's core watermarking technology to a variety of real-world applications.
Digimarc also has a group of incredibly talented R&D engineers, experts in signal
processing, working to enhance the core watermark technology
and keep Digimarc at the forefront of the digital watermarking world.
I was involved with a number of interesting projects at Digimarc. The most recent
was IDVS Document Authentication, an
application that performs document authentication of driver licenses and a number
of associated
breeder documents. IDVS has facets that acquire document images through an extensible
interface, then validates the data on the document through another extensible validation
interface. I was the lead developer for the presentation layer of this product.
The UI is a very modern and easy to use interface that is now the model for
other commercial Digimarc applications.
My last position at Digimarc was as the Engineering Manager for the IDVS Document
Authentication product and the IDMarc Watermark SDK. I managed three
other developers and spent a significant amount of time as an individual
contributor for upcoming releases.
For the past few years I've been leveraging the power and productivity of the
.NET Framework in the products I've worked on. I've been using C# on and off since early 2002 and am I ever sold. Hook, line and
sinker, the .NET Framework is today THE way to develop software today for the Windows
environment. I really think
Microsoft has really done it right this time. Of course it's not perfect but
its about as close as Microsoft has ever come with a development platform.
I've been trying to leverage
C# wherever it makes a good fit in projects I work on at Digimarc. I started
by creating an adaptable and
incredibly robust GUI application framework for demonstrating our various watermarking
technologies to diverse markets using C# &
XML/XSL. The project was a blast as it allowed me to really dig into C# and XSL. The application
framework supports managed plug-ins for extending its capabilities as new forms
of our watermarking engine arrive. It also has a fully customizable GUI as well as
a very flexible detection engine, both scripted using a set of XML data files. It
was designed in such a way that most of the customization can be done by our Technical
Marketing Engineers, with little or no help required from the software development
team.
Another interesting project was a web front end for our customers personal account management
system. This web application allows our
ImageBridge customers to manage their own account and gain access to our watermark reporting
system features. This project allowed me to dive into
ASP.NET head first and was an great learning experience. I had done some
ASP development back in 1997 and have dabbled in it ever since, but from the very beginning,
along with many other developers, I absolutely hated the mixture of code and HTML.
I've seen some insanely convoluted and impossible to decipher ASP code over the
years. My discovery of ASP.NETs code-behind technique is just one of those "doh!" moments. This is the way web development was meant to be. And there is no going back. But
ASP.NET is quite different from ASP in a lot of ways, so there was a lot to learn
in a short period to get this project off the ground with a very aggressive schedule.
Still, it was so much fun that I worked harder than I had since the early entrepreneurial
days at Tally.
My first project at Digimarc was a set of watermark detection plug-ins for
Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. As you browse the internet or your local hard drive the
plug-ins scan all images encountered in real-time and overlay a small icon in the
lower right corner of any images that are watermarked. You then have access to additional
information and functionality related to the content in the images. The plug-ins
include a COM based caching subsystem that enables fast access to the detection
results of any image encountered before.
Tally Systems:
Click here to read about my career at Tally Systems.
My Education
Masters in Software Engineering - Brandeis University
In the spring of 2000 I completed my Masters Degree in Software Engineering at
Brandeis University in Waltham MA. It was no small feat to take on a graduate
program while working full time. For me it worked out because my wife was in Veterinary
school at the time and was therefor very busy, not leaving a whole lot of 'us' time. It
made sense to take advantage of the opportunity and was a challenging yet rewarding couple of years.
Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering - Wentworth Institute of Technology
Directly out of high school I attended Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.
I graduated in the summer of 1989 with a BS in Computer Engineering. Wentworth is
a very technical school on the fringes of downtown Boston and was a great and very
eye-opening experience for a native from a relatively small town in New Hampshire.