I am a talented problem solver and excel at accomplishing major tasks with extremely limited resources. I've got a bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering, am interested in everything from machine learning to human perception/cognition to design to photography to music performance, and most likely know more than a little bit about your area of interest.
If you're interested in working with me to put my wide variety of skills together in order build a big cool thing, give me a ring or shoot me an email.
employment history
Electronics Engineer at the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences—10 years
I design and conduct experiments that answer unique questions about how human perception of aural and visual stimulus correlates to the performance of communication systems. I then analyze, document and present the results in the appropriate venues, whether they be conference papers, journals, or standards bodies. I'm a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
In addition to my technical responsibilities, I manage two projects and play an active role in the development and health of the Institute. Whether officially representing the U.S. Government to international standards bodies, providing consult in one of my areas of expertise, building and maintaining infrastructure, helping to develop processes and best practices or building an entirely new research capability, I find the opportunity to identify and solve problems extremely rewarding.
- Experiment Design, Data Analysis and Reporting
- Co-designed 2 speech intelligibility experiments and have administered, analyzed results, and reported on 4 experiments
- Represented the U.S. Department of Commerce by presenting two reports [first, second] and informed codec selection activities for mission-critical push-to-talk functionality in 3GPP Release 13 LTE standards.
- This effort was recognized by former Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker with a U.S. Department of Commerce Silver Medal Award.
- Designed an experiment to collect performance data and thoroughly compare H.264 and H.265 performance and assess the suitability of common objective quality metrics to stand in for human perception experiments
- The results show that H.265's efficiency gains vary significantly depending on content type and that PSNR and even VQM are not highly correlated with subjective human quality assessments.
- Designed an experiment to measure the impact of non-standard viewing environments and non-standard monitors (including laptops and mobile devices) on human perception of video quality
- This experiment demonstrated that good/excellent video quality can be achieved without delivering full-resolution video to mobile devices and that further, depending on scenario, there may be no benefit to doing so.
- Helped build an experiment designed to assess whether and under what conditions crowdsourcing can augment and/or replace highly controlled intelligibility experiments
- Designed an experiment that measures a listener's ability to recognize who is talking given a speech communication system
- Completed literature search, experiment design, UI development, implementation, data analysis, documentation and publication in 9 months as the primary researcher during my first year of employ.
- These experiments (and others not listed) resulted in 16 peer-reviewed publications
- Programming
- Developed Python programs to add noise to, normalize, resample and transcode massive audio stimulus libraries among arbitrary codecs
- Wrote front-end and back-end components to support a major crowdsourcing initiative including a custom interface for audio playback, resource download checking, filename obfuscation and automatic interface code generation
- Designed a full-stack, multi-platform audio/video quality assessment platform enabling researchers to implement human subjective opinion measurement experiments using configuration files
- Ported iLBC speech codec from C to Matlab to facilitate signal processing research
- Wrote extensive algorithmic and signal processing programs in Matlab
- Developed experimental user interfaces in Matlab for use in novel human subjective opinion measurement experiments
- Project Management
- Lead a research project investigating radio frequency interactions among IoT radio access technologies
- The project consists of building infrastructure (network equipment, IoT devices and gateways, logistics software and RF measurement systems) to facilitate conducting repeatable experiments and spectrum usage data.
- Lead a project to build modular and extensible signal storage and processing engine
- This piece of infrastructure will store audio/video/signal libraries, monitor for corruption, and facilitate algorithm development by separating it from data storage and access.
- Sysadmin
- Migrated legacy web and FTP servers to a modern platform in order to mitigate security concerns
- Maintained public facing web and FTP servers that serve as a video library distribution system
- Maintained internal Gitlab server and synchronized backup server that motivated the uptake of source code repository use in the Institute
- Awards
- United States Department of Commerce Silver Medal Award for Scientific and Engineering Achievement, 2016
- ITS Outstanding Publication Award, “Multiple-Description Speech Coding using Speech-Polarity Decomposition,” 2010
- EFPL Best Paper Award given at the First International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience, “Gradient Ascent Paired-Comparison Subjective Quality Testing,” 2009
- ITS Outstanding Publication Award, “Intelligibility of Selected Radio Systems in the Presence of Fireground Noise,” 2008
Electrical Engineering Graduate Assistant at the University of Wyoming—1 year
- To complete my master's degree I built a single digit speech recognition system using features from the iLBC speech codec, recurrent neural nets (RNNs) and K-means clustering. I showed that training a unique RNN with one hidden layer and a binary output for each digit could achieve similar performance to a K-means based vector quantization system.
- Curriculum focused on signal processing and pattern classification
- Coauthor on 2 peer-reviewed publications
- Received the IEEE Student Choice Award as the Outstanding Teaching Assistant
- Graded homework for digital design (Verilog, HDL) and microprocessors
- Prepared for, taught, and graded two sections of communication theory lab