Robert John McCall Curriculum Vitae Timeline of recent work: 2000 August Enrolled at Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Originally I was going to be a mathematics/physics double major, but over the course of my freshman year I discovered theoretical computer science and simultaneously lost interest in academically pursuing physics. October Began research with Jade Goldstein at CMU's Language Technologies Institute, under Jaime Carbonell. At this point, I was simply developing an applet front-end to her text summarizer; by summer we'd started investigating the use of document-feature classifiers for identifying document genre (that is, whether it's a news article, a movie review, etc.). 2001 fall Began the Mathematical Studies sequence, a two-semester rigorous survey of undergraduate mathematics, including formal logic, set theory, algebra, and a formal treatment of integral calculus. Became the 2nd Vice President of the CMU KGB -- that is, I became the activities coordinator for a fifty-person student group with weekly events (despite the name, KGB is a non-political social organization). I held this position until the May, 2002. 2002 spring To everyone's surprise, Linear Algebra II became an undergraduate research course for this one semester. I was asked to classify all three-dimensional associative algebras, which I believe is an open problem. I'm still working on it, off and on. Helped KGB build a "booth" for CMU's Spring Carnival. Over the course of a month, I sank well over a hundred hours into this -- in retrospect, probably a mistake, given that I simultaneously: Took Operating Systems, an intensive course in OS development in which I designed and implemented a UNIX-like kernel and filesystem. At one point, I was scheduled to T.A. it the next semester -- but I ran out of energy during Booth, my grade slipped, and I was disqualified. Still, one of my favorite experiences from college. summer Interned with Intellions.com, a very recent start-up: I was one of only three employees. We developed software for analyzing price/demand curves in online stores by dynamically changing the price. Interned at iCarnegie, Inc., a CMU-affiliated online school of technology. A few CMU students were asked to develop a systems-programming course in conjunction with CMU Professor David O'Hallaron; I created course material for the section on operating systems, and I wrote a lab in which students used the Pentium's cycle counter to identify context switches. Finished my work with Jade Goldstein. fall Worn out and personal crisis. I did attempt to withdraw from CMU for the semester, but my advisor recommended against it. 2003 December Graduated from CMU with a B.S. in Mathematics and a double major in Computer Science 2004 January Began full-time employment as a software developer at MAYA Viz, a collaborative information- visualization company. Viz's core product is a collaborative architecture and UI environment called CoMotion, on top of which other applications are written. My primary role has been as a visualization and interface developer for TransViz, a CoMotion-based logistical analysis tool for the U.S. Transportation Command; my duties include maintaining the TransViz user interface and working with information and visual designers to develop efficient visualizations for large data sets (30,000+ items). April Wrote a general framework for on-the-fly changes to the mechanics of CoMotion visualizations: for example, to switch the data attributes visualized on one axis of a chart August Became the primary maintainer of MAYA Viz's map architecture, used extensively by the Command Post of the Future (CPOF), a software package currently deployed to active U.S. Army divisions in Iraq 2005 April MAYA Viz sells itself to General Dynamics, a major American defense contractor May Developed an architecture for parsing user-authored XML files with goals of strict validation, error recovery, and high levels of user feedback. Applied this architecture to the chart-specification language, greatly streamlining the process of creating new visualizations. August Applied the above XML-parsing architecture to the application configuration files. Areas of research experience: Automated document classification, particularly on applying feature classifiers to the problem of identifying the "genre" of a document (news article, opinion piece, review, etc.), through work with Jade Goldstein and Jaime Carbonell. Information Architecture (IA), particularly on practical considerations of schema choice and user-specified schemas, through work with MAYA's "u-form" architecture. Information Visualization (InfoVis), particularly on visualization creation and architectural approaches to information extraction, through work with Stefan Kerpedjiev. Areas of practice: 6 years as an application/architecture developer in Java 4 years of side projects in functional languages, particularly SML and OCAML 3 years as a "hard" systems programmer in C 2 years as a professional software developer, including experience in: - creating and maintaining stable product releases - requirements analysis and prototype development with visual, information, and interaction designers - automated and manual software testing - configuration management Obligatory laundry list of other skills: graphical user interface design, development, and user testing passably literate in French (e.g., I can translate French technical papers, and I once wrote proofs in French for an entire semester) technical interviewer for two years UNIX (FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris) programming and maintenance use and configuration of CVS, Perforce, Bugzilla, Apache, Tomcat, etc.