john billingsley

One of the on-the-road jack-of-all-trades guys, doing -- as required -- POC work, installations, training, support, emergency triage and client-calming, all intertwined with long-term on-site project design and management. Emphasis was on flexibility, ramping up quickly on the operating system, architecture and databases that were in use wherever you landed.

During the run-up to the mortgage crisis FM created an initiative to restate all their mortgages, and to forge a single coherent process of doing so out of a mass of distinct and organically accreted legacy systems. Several hundred outside AI consultants were hired -- two consultants from AI, one of them myself, were on-site to shepherd the process, maintain communications with management, in-house programmers and outside consultants and offering technical assists as necessary.

HD decided to create a single comprehensive accounting and control system, "register to dashboard". Existing solutions were spread across several different systems but there was a strong knowledge base in-company of the business rules, so we could focus more on enacting those rules and less on puzzling out legacy code.

Essentially a port, but quite large-scale, they wanted to go from a mainframe-based Cobol system to a modern multi-processing Unix system with Ab Initio. A big system, mostly legacy code, interesting to reconcile COBOL with newer systems, and doing it efficiently through coding conversion routines where possible.

Porting their existing customer time / ad pricing software. Technically not bad, but socially tricky, with deep resentment among some existing employees about the new technology, not to mention some interesting revelations about the accuracy of their previous calculations. Speed increased by a factor of 10, improvement in code documentation and coherence comparable.

Two of us came in from AI with a POC demonstrating our ability to handle a large-scale database analysis pull for a ten-million-plus campaign mailout, spent over a week sitting on our hands waiting for time on their machine, then replicated their existing process with a speed increase of over 20 to 1. That convinced (most of) management, and we were given a lot of interesting work to do, but at the time the in-house employees were competent database managers not programmers and transitioning them turned into the real challenge.

Partnered with a psychologist on a grant-funded project to sell to the military, software to enhance GUI interactions in combat. Monitor the stress of high-value combatants (fighter pilots) and reference against outside inputs (incoming threats) and modify the GUI outputs to prompt an appropriate response. The idea was to make it self-learning via a neural net and multiple runs through a hacked combat simulator, but the really fun part was the pilot stress, which was evaluated through an interface with a heart-rate monitor. Real-time biological data is tricky.

A data visualization company. Created user-specific tools to graphically represent data, with an eye towards folding those in to the company's general suite of products. Lots of GUI building, which was interesting, with a lot of different clients, from early 3d manipulation of medical scans to real-time security system monitoring, automatic and user-directed, for sensitive military sites.

The head of the Collections department wanted to shift reliance on the larger Revenue mainframe system to a more easily accessible PC-based system and rather than pushing through a department reorganization he hired me. On the technical side this required pulling data from the mainframe as required to feed the local database, then working with analysts, training relevant personnel, creating software to feed call centers and do mail-outs, all starting from scratch for an entire floor, some 200 people, all needing new equipment, software and training -- and eventually interacting with various curious (or irate) bureaucrats who had heard about the project.

Implementing and designing Computer Aided Instruction for JSEP, an Army education project teaching high-school level skills to new recruits, partnered with CET to test and collect data on educational methods, using the PLATO system. Working with instructional designers to craft coherent lessons on the computer, design testing on a lesson-by-lesson basis, collect data from small and large-scale subject runs, and design software to interpret the resulting data. Started as a programmer, quickly moved to managing the night shift programmers and then to managing the entire technical staff. of about 25 programmers and artists at its peak.

High performance Data Engineering