Michael Turyn

Image version of my contact information, used instead of text in an attempt to foil spiders.

Who?

I'm not a cookie-cutter programmer. I am

a rigorously trained physicist and programmer with eight-plus years' experience in e-commerce, interface design and object-oriented development
marked by a strong imagination and a high capacity for smart/hard work in the near-obsessive pursuit of problem-solving.
a lover of clever solutions who knows when 'stupid' isn't a bad word.
motivated by the desires for material gain and a job well-done, and by an ethic demanding excellence, honesty, and compassion.

Objective

To find a position in a dynamic and innovative organization where my experience and abilities will be exercised in the solution of interesting or vital problems and the creation of new and useful software.

Skills

Object oriented development: Java (Sun Certified Programmer for Java 2 Platform 1.4), Smalltalk, C++, JavaScript

Other technologies: VoiceXML, XML/XSL, C, MACSYMA, Fortran, Pascal, Lisp, some Perl and Python, RT-11 and x86 assembly.

User interface design: JSPs, HTML, DHTML, Dojo widgets, XAP, Dynamo JHTML, TEX, Swing, AJAX

Platforms: Windows, OS/2, DOS, UNIX, Solaris, J2EE (and equivalent Dynamo servers), Cocoon

Phone platforms: Windows Mobile 5, Android, Research in Motion (basic level for all), BlackBerry/R.i.M.

Human languages: French, some Spanish and Japanese

Experience

Verizon, Inc. (via Apex Systems, Inc.), Boston, Ma.. 2007.08-Present

A multinational provider of phone, mædia, and data services.

Software engineer

Working on an advanced handset/server design employing client scripting handing off to web services. Java/SOAP, JavaScript, a bit of C# .NET, Android SDK, Blackberry JME, JSPs.

Nexaweb, Inc., Burlington, Ma.. 2006.04-2007.07

A strong post-startup player in the “rich internet” sphere.

Software engineer

Creating JavasScript code and porting Java code to JavaScript for “Xap”, an ongoing Apache Incubator project.

(Xap is an XML-based declarative markup system for creating browser and stand-alone client-based applications and connecting them to data sources.) Creating widgets using Javascript/HTML/HTML_DOM ( “Ajax”), and the Zimbra and Dojo toolkits. Contributed to the ongoing architecture process for the product suite. Given strong responsibility for a large portion of an aggressively-scheduled project.

Adaptive Technology Laboratory, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 2006
An innovating resource meeting the needs of handicapped students and faculty at Harvard.

Consultant

Proofreading and correcting LATEX auto-generated from scans of mathematics and science textbooks; developing tools in elisp and Perl to automate the more predictable tasks.

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Cambridge, MA 2003
A cutting-edge research institution dedicated to advanced, commercially viable, innovation.

Consultant

Wrote content for the demo of a speech-based travellers' advisory system for automotive use. Coded for the demo's interface using Macromedia Lingo, wrote simple flat-file database functionality in Java, invented an analyser to ease the addition of new words to the speech recogniser's internal dictionary (by specifying or guessing the pronunciation of new words using extant words).

Did extensive comparative analysis of different recognisers' accuracies in noisy environments using Python, Java, MATLAB, and MS Excel. Conducted evaluations of different text-to-speech synthesisers using an interface built in Java Swing. Hacked the open-source FreeTTS product to expose its pronunciation-guessing functionality. Wrote a simple speech recogniser in C using Fonix's API.

Unveil Technologies, Waltham, MA 2002

A bleeding-edge startup working to extend the effectiveness of speech recognition capabilities via its core meaning recognition technology.

Consultant

Used Apache's Cocoon 2 (a servlet-based, dynamic, XML technology) to create data-models that can be used for both VoiceXML and (at least as a start) HTML web-pages.

Art Technology Group, Cambridge, MA 1998-2001

A $163M corporation and leading provider of server-side Java-based solutions for customer relationship management, corporate infrastructure, and electronic commerce products.

Software Applications Engineer

Created servlet-based web pages using and extending Java and ATG's Dynamo application, personalization, and commerce servers. Worked on projects of varying scope and duration from 2 to 12 months for clients in financial services and e-commerce. Utilized object-oriented hooks into SQL databases (Oracle and Sybase) via JDBC and ATG's own proprietary layers, including XML-based object/database mapping.

Created extensions to ATG's basic personalization code base which improved customer and administrator functionality with enhancements including case insensitive login and user friendly profile forms
Co-developed intranet site for major mutual fund company that combined static web content with broker targeted fund performance, market news, and sales tips
Played a major role in the creation of an enterprise-wide knowledge base: created user profile and admin pages, created an email based content creation system. Extensively coded major enhancements throughout the knowledge base for improved performance, search capabilities, fail-over and ease-of-use
Provided technical guidance to a 3rd party integrator working with Herman-Miller on the upgrade of their Dynamo-based site.

Nombas, Inc., Medford, MA 1996-1998

A privately held niche-leader in scripting technology for the desktop, web, and embedded systems.

Principal Software Engineer

Performed the development, testing, promotion, and extension of ScriptEase, a super-set of standard JavaScript, which it predated as a user-friendly interpreted C-like language. Conducted SQA, supported end-users, wrote new libraries to extend ODBC functionality and serial port access. Presented technology and product features as representative at COMDEX and other trade-shows. Designed icons and animations for web pages and browsers.

Made substantial improvement in the core and G.U.I. of the Nombas debugger
Representative to ECMA committee TC-39 for the design specification of the next version of JavaScript
Wrote a JNI-based Java/C++ native code interface to allow use of Nombas' functionality from Java on Win32 platforms
Ported the ScriptEase source code from C/C++ to pure Java

Sensimetrics, Inc., Cambridge, MA 1995

A small phonetic and acoustics research and development company.

Software Engineer

Created content for a multimedia course in phonetics using Microsoft Visual C++ and ToolBook.

Used Windows graphics programming for interactive 3-D visualizations of spectrographic data
Created interfaces to engage the student to allow capture, manipulation, and analysis of speech to illustrate basic acoustic and phonetic principles

Red Shark Technology, Somerville, MA 1991-1993

A visionary multimedia startup that pioneered true desktop video editing and LAN/WAN-based media distribution and streaming.

Software Engineer

Developed multimedia-oriented software, using Smalltalk and C, performed wide range of tasks from system admin and backup to QA to writing installation scripts.

Designed and implemented GUI-based video and audio editors using standard and custom controls
Wrote file format transformation utilities for AVSS, AVI, BMP, WAVE, and Red Shark proprietary file formats, including image conversion and processing utilities
Designed and implemented DLL APIs for file access and transformation, wrote interface layers for extant DLLs.
Improved the Smalltalk environment and source control systems

Consultant sporadically during 1989-1995

SoftKey, Inc., Cambridge, MA

Performed final pre-release testing on a mass-market résumé-creation product.

Marble Associates, Waltham, MA

Smalltalk mentoring, coding, and design tool re-engineering in a financial services support environment.

Dragon Systems, Inc., Newton, MA

Investigated noise-robust continuous speech recognition using C and C++. Frequent recourse to multi- parameter, signal-processing techniques; grant-obligated technical reports written.

MAD Intelligent Systems, Inc., Cambridge, MA

Did general system maintenance. Performed 80386-based Unix workstation repair, network administration, and shell-script writing. Soldered, programmed, strung cables, solved full range of workstation problems.

Education

Ph.D., Physics, 1990, Tufts University, Medford, MA

Dissertation: Vacuum Fluctuations in Maximally Symmetric Spaces. Used symbolic manipulation and hierarchical search techniques in the study of quantum fields in maximally symmetric space-times.

Featured Speaker: Conference on Computational Quantum Field Theory in Curved Backgrounds, National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois, Urbana, 1987.

University jobs: Teaching assistant, research assistant, LaTeX/PC guru, assembly programmer, and (at Fermilab) film/holographic particle event scanning and bubble chamber maintenance.

M.S., Physics, 1985, Tufts University, Medford, MA

Tailored a version of the TeX document formatting system to automate equation numbering and reference annotation.

B.S., Physics, 1984, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA

Mary A. E. McKinney Prize in Literature, awarded for outstanding creative writing. Darb.

Interests

Languages, cooking, graphic arts, writing, history, martial arts, old music, bricolage.