Achievements/Experience

Achievements/Experience:

(A long but accurate account of the experience that is on offer to you - please take the time to read it)

1997 ORACLE Corporation& Software Localisation Interest Group (SLIG)
     While running the Retail Consultancy practise and maintaining my V.R. research and teaching with the young children who were frustrated prodigies, I held and continue to hold a full time position at the ORACLE Corporation, Worldwide Translation Group in Dublin, Ireland. With 38,000 employees, this is the second largest computer company in the World after Microsoft. My task here was to produce complex internal tools to aid in the translation of products into European and Asia/Pacific (Chinese & Korean double-byte) languages. I am a member of the Software Localisation Interest Group (SLIG) and in attending their frequent meetings meet my piers in Symantec, Lotus, Corel, Isocor, Berlitz, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. I was also involved in researching and designing the best protocols and procedures for these companies to deal with the localisation issues that arise with the new JAVA based line of products.

     My projects at ORACLEinvolved general technical support, hardware & software advise, the design and implementation of their Intranet, design, production and QA of parsing tools to successfully translate RTF help files into their HTML equivalents in various languages. Also the building of Corpus based Translation Memories, and binary parsing tools to locate hard-coded strings within DLL files. Visual Basic tools and Macro's for updating and integrity checking binary resource files and as Macros to automate the production of Excel financial spreadsheets, the design of file management systems, Bulletin boards and source control techniques were also implemented. I also designed a Resource Allocation Manager (RAM) to be used for timetabling translators and language specialists across Europe, this project was entirely Web Based and could therefore be operated, maintained and edited remotely.

1997 Retail Consultancy
     Following the success of the previous Nipex project (listed below) I had a flood of customers wanting me to restructure their business from the ground up, and expand them into multi-franchise companies where appropriate. Those accepted for consultancy & implementation were Computer Hardware, Stationary stores, Pharmacies, Cafe's, Hardware shops, Hotels, Bars, Nightclubs, Restaurants and most other retail areas. All were successful with a minimum of 600% increase in revenue & employment.

1996 Nipex Sports Chain - Computerisation
     Following the publicity from the Falcon Project, I was contracted by a sports chain to computerise their entire operation completely. This involved staff training, accountancy, equipment supply, full technical support, networks architecture design and implementation, stock control, point of sale software and barcode scanning of stock, system security, automatic stock taking, inter-branch transfers, overnight batch polling and the design of employee procedure lists for authorised personnel, offsite backup routines and a chain of command. After the system had been put in place I followed it up by designing automatic statistical analysis of sales data so that the manager's (now able to concentrate on stock purchase) could dial in remotely to view graphs on the profitability of individual shops or departments within those shops. This enabled tracking of aged stock, theft, profit margins etc. The chain should now be able to double it's number of outlets by January, with less staff and leaving relieved managers with more time. The snowball effect of profits in each new shop opened have led to plans to change the firms policy to allow a central buying warehouse and mail order business by mid '97.

1996 Freelance contract work for various companies, troubleshooting and consultancy for networks, computerisation, multimedia and accountancy systems. For example, I completed a £200,000 CD-ROM project feasibility analysis for the production of a series of educational CD-ROM's for primary school children of four to twelve years.

1996 Isocor Ireland hired me for the third year for a contract involving the QA of new PPP gateway software. I programmed an automated test suite for a full test spec in the script language of the new gateway.

1996 "WinLocX" - Windows Localisation of X Languages - The aftermath
     Following the development of the system I toured the computer industry giants interested in the project. I demonstrated the product, handled the radio and press interviews and releases, and proposed the project, now valued at $11,000,000 by Italian industry experts, to London investors for up to $2,000,000 deposits. I also handled all code security and copyright legalities personally.

1996 "WinLocX" - Windows Localisation of X Languages
     This project, codename Falcon was my largest personal project to date. I submitted it as my final year project for my double degree course at Sussex University, but have still managed to maintain 100% ownership of the intellectual property rights. This project consists of 7500 lines of Visual C++ code to construct a giant parser with a full menu driven windows interface. This parser locates the printed strings in ANY source code language and stores them in a translation table. When the table of strings has been translated into another language then a substitution program replaces the original strings in the code for the new strings, thus translating (localising) the source code of the program so that it may be sold abroad. This project is accompanied by a 200 page manual and a 30min presentation speech. I would welcome the chance to explain the significance of this project by making this presentation to you at your convenience.

1996 Various projects designed and written for mainframe systems with concurrent processing transputers in the OCCAM parallel programming language. I also wrote all components of a compiler for a language sub-set of C and completed a full statistical analysis report on Hopfield Neural Networks and their performance. All results were presented in two, three and four dimensional colour graphs. Once again this project was rated as best on the course.

1995 Produced and applied learning algorithms to "Mobot" test data. This was in turn displayed and analysed on an X-Windows interface simulation of the Mobot's behaviour. This work gave me the distinction of being the best on the course.

1995 Network NewsGroup reading user interface for the UNIX system coded in Gnu C. I crafted the user interface using C's "curses" libraries and used the NNTP protocol specification for all network communication. Error trapping, screen resizing in X-Windows and communication time-out's were all included using C interrupt routines.

1995/96 For four months after employment at ISOCOR, I worked on a remote contract with them by producing Visual C++ software that could perform remote upgrades on multiple sites and machines around the world of Email clients. This system was small enough to be Emailed with a message and was coded under "Safety critical" conditions, making my code extremely robust.

1995 For three months of the summer of 1995, I was employed as a consultant Software Engineer by the Los Angeles owned software communications company ISOCOR Ireland Ltd, based in Dublin. This large communications company is a world leader in the production of Email, Server and Network systems for a multi-platform market. This was my second summer contract with them. My tasks, as always, became quite diverse as my experience became apparent and included:(in order of volume)
1. I started working as a QA engineer on a product and updated the BugBase with over 200 undetected design flaws. Perfecting this product's performance to the satisfaction of the customer by firmly requesting supplier co-operation. This Email program required exhaustive testing over various protocols, APS, Asynchronous, TCP/IP, etc. I learned how to configure and test each connection and also the combinations possible when dialling up remote PAD connections to connect with message stores.
2. Flow-chart analysis, debugging, modularisation, recoding and testing of in-house and presentation windows programs written using the Microsoft Word 6 Macro language Word Basic, including the use of MAPI calls to send and messages. These macros were complex lengths of code using stacks to parse and process multiple sets of files, using the Word 6 word processor as an engine. The software utilities produced included a localisation tool, an X500 server monitor (Producing tables) and a two way address Mapper between X400 format and MSMail format.
3. Wrote in-house software tool in Visual C++ for CRC-Checking floppy disks for a security check between the engineering and manufacturing departments.
4.Set-up internal Internet server for testing in production of the company's new WebSite homepage.
5. Studied architecture of a large software project in order to design a localisation kit for it.

1995 Large Computer Vision project for tracking objects in motion over frames produced by a CCD camera. Some of these objects were camouflaged against a moving background, this without the advantage of stereo information, or inference based on model representation led to the innovative use of some of the latest techniques in this scientific and highly mathematical field.

1995 "HTML2TXT"UNIX filter utility for the Internet Hyper-text Mark Up Language.
This fifteen-person team project was completed in the form of deliverable documents to customers in the strict quality format of the software lifecycle. Analysis, Design and Programming teams were organised for formal meetings and all details of software shipment were covered, liaising with the customer, software documentation, automatic test suites, user documentation, installation processes, data-flow diagrams, etc. The project was coded in Modula-2 using abstract data types.

1994 For three months of the summer of 1994, I was employed as a consultant Software Engineer by ISOCOR Ireland Ltd. My tasks, as always, became quite diverse as my experience became apparent and included: (in order of work volume)

1. Designing and Coding Localisation Engineering software (kits), Automated translation processes to change Visual C code to allow the product to be re-compiled in a different language (mostly European), this increased the marketing department's sales by 150%.
2. Management of source code control and the writing of related software and procedures, I managed to overcome the enormous task of producing a mould of procedures and systems to take code from the design stage right through to the "shipping" stage, and avoid the later conflicts of confusion over versions, bug reports, source code sales, copyright and localisation while still managing to avoid an unnecessary "Red-Tape" (which would be quickly pointed out and criticised by a programming team). In doing so, I had to use the management skills I'd acquired in running my own business and organising the Olympic programming team to liaise between the programmers, customers, designers, managers, technical documenters and strictest of all, the quality control department to produce rules that everyone could happily compromise to.
3. PC maintenance (General, Network and virus related including inoculators).
4. Software Architecture decisions - security related.
5. Technical Support to customers,
6. Producing and running automated test suites for Official Testing of shipped software, plus the resulting formal documentation.
7. Production and Implementation of company control procedures, guide-lines and protocol for: "in-house" software tools, purchased software and hardware, (Network Databasing), source code documentation, source code control (including automated back-up storage), localisation, copyright issues, testing, security (both source code and network).

1994 Redefined the Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence and had the definition approved by A.I. University experts. It is now referred to as the "Astro Physics Definition".

1994 Created the Generic Micro Universe Robot A-life Simulator.

1993 Created the Puzzle-8 G.P.S. Solution.

1993 Roddie Cowie, the host of the A.I.C.S. for 1993 in Queens asked me to make a presentation to over 200 international AI and CS experts of my PCPAL project and Virtual Reality research. The package created quite a buzz among with delegates and was the topic of many a discussion for the following three days. Irving Beiderman, vision systems expert from the University of California went through the code and theory with me in great detail.

1993 Received sponsorship from Aer Lingus and travelled to Argentina as team leader and took part in the world Olympics in Informatics competing against 450 other countries. This led to live interviews on the American TV channel CNN and extensive media coverage in the UK. I led my team to the top!

1992 Created and marketed the PCPAL project for PC systems.

1992 First in Ireland again as team leader/coach of Team Unicorn in the Wisconsin Competition. In the Dublin City University Ranking, I was 0.5 of a point away from the fifth best high speed programmer in the world championships.

1992 Lectured at the Vocational Technical Secondary school in Kilkenny on the implications of Virtual Reality on Wang systems for the engineering students.

1992 Worked in London for 9 weeks for the number one European company for computer security and modem encryption, "ZERGO". I designed and developed two interactive database projects for the multi-million pound firm's LAN network.

1992 Attended the Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science conference in the University of Limerick (A.I.C.S.), by special invite from Dr. Padraig Cunningham. There, I discussed my ideas over dinner with Dr. Bernhard Blochl of Germany, Eric Sandewall of Sweden and Roddie Cowie of Queens, Belfast. I have had much correspondence with these people since and advice has been gladly given in both directions.

1992 Discussed my current A.I. discoveries, particularly the Speak Art fifth generation computer application, in the Dublin Hitachi research lab with Dr. Padraig Cunningham. I reluctantly turned down his offer to merge our secrets and join his team as an apprentice because I wanted to finish my Leaving Cert. and have my qualification as a safety net.

1991 Created and marketed the Trident-5000 project for Amstrad PC systems.

1991 Discussed my Speak Art project with, and was given a Trinity College lab tour by, the head of the computer science department Prof. John Byrne.

1991 Interview with Pure Maths lecturer, Dr. Paul Barry, in Waterford Regional Technical College to explain my ordinance survey graphical mapping system.

1991 Took and passed Professor Edmund Holohan's aptitude and assessment test for entry to a four year computer science degree course at The Business and Accountancy Training college, Morehampton Road, Dublin. I was later disqualified from entry as I had just turned sixteen. (Minimum entry age was 18 years).

1991 First in Ireland in the 1991 Wisconsin International Computer Problem Solving Competition.

1990 Planned and documented the Speak Art project for fifth generation computers.

1990 Visual ordinance survey mapping and databasing expert system for agriculture.

1990 U.S. Airforce F-16 Fighter Jet Blueprints negative origin technique perfected and prototyped.

1989 Speech Recognition based on Oscilloscope pattern matching.

1988 Working Speech synthesis system with "Phonemes to English" converter.

Honours markings in both the Inter and Leaving Certificate Secondary School examinations in eight subjects.

Any questions about the projects or a request to discuss their code is welcomed, either by phone or interview. Personal references and media coverage samples available by request.


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