Independent Consultant - Aug 2010 - Present (2 months)
Designing and developing mobile applications for the Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows Phone 7 platforms
- Developed ‘What’s My Size?’ an app for the iPhone that calculates your clothing size in over 85 brands based on your body measurements.
- What’s My Size? had 35,000 downloads in two weeks and was in the Top 15 Utility apps list for the iPhone for all time.
- What’s My Size was selected by Apple for the New and Noteworthy section of the App Store.
Product Manager - Feb 2009 - Present (18 months)
Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh
Responsible for planning, design, development and marketing of several complex software research grants with operating budgets exceeding $4million.
- Created and maintained project schedules for 20 individuals across two independent development teams and three different institutions.
- Lead product design for Slidetutor, with the goal to transform it from an internal research system to a publicly accessible web application for use by pathology residents, instructors and faculty to learn pathology diagnosis, create curriculums and take tests.
- Lead continued development for caTIES and ODIE products, implementing new features, testing usability and improving UI. Oversaw four software releases over 12 months.
- Successfully restructured the five year SlideTutor grant to be completed in two years. Introduced new social project management techniques which increased team productivity by 400%.
- Provided overall leadership for implementation, operation and maintenance of TIES at UPMC – a customized caTIES implementation for UPMC which provides access to 1.7 million pathology reports across all 17 UPMC hospitals in Pennsylvania.
- Chaired monthly project status meetings, and bi-annual project planning meetings.
- Managed resource conflicts and risks, tracked issues and resolved problems.
- Provided senior level user interface design and system architecture expertise.
- Mentored and supervised junior programmers in the team.
Project Leader - September 2008 to March 2009 (6 Months)
Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh
Responsible for leading design and development for software products.
- Lead design and development for ODIE - a software toolkit with NLP algorithms for ontology enrichment and information extraction from free text medical documents. Team size: 6, Budget:$2million, Technical Environment: Eclipse RCP, Apache UIMA, GATE, Apache Lucene, Hibernate Core/Annotations, MySQL 5.1
- Designed ODIE logo, website and other communications material with focus on communicating a consistent message and branding across all mediums.
- Primary presenter of the software to external research centers to effectively communicate the merits of the software to senior researchers and program administrators.
- Setup an active user community support infrastructure that supports 100+ users with tools like forums, trackers, mailing lists and websites. Marketing strategy along with community support increased our user base from two institutions to over 10 institutions in a year. Increased downloads by 1000% in two years.
- Worked with hospital stakeholders to draft access provisioning, security and auditing policies in compliance with governmental and hospital regulatory requirements for TIES.
- Designed and implemented the TIES website for UPMC and Pitt researchers allowing them to request access, watch training videos and tutorials and watch the app status dashboard for the system.
Senior UI Architect - May 2005 to September 2008 (3+ Years)
Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh
Responsible for designing, prototyping, evaluating and implementing user experiences for software products.
- Developed the UI for caTIES – CAncer Text Information Extraction System, an application that supports collaborative tissue banking and text mining by leveraging existing natural language processing methods and algorithms, grid communication and security frameworks, and query visualization methods. Team size: 4, Budget:$4.5million, Technical Environment: Java Swing, GATE, Apache Lucene, Apache Axis, Apache ANT, JDOM, Globus Toolkit 4, caGRID, OGSADAI, WSRF, Hibernate Core, Eclipse IDE, Apache Tomcat 5.5, MySQL 5.1, Oracle10g .
- Held interviews, designed questionnaires and used contextual inquiry sessions to elicit user requirements from different cancer centers and research consortia across the country.
- Designed common workflows, user roles, and user experiences to increase efficiency while meeting a spectrum of regulatory requirements across various institutions.
- Developed and successfully executed deployment plans for four initial adopter sites across the country. Deployment plans served as a template for numerous future adoptions of caTIES.
- Developed marketing, community support and product branding strategy including logos and PowerPoint templates for caTIES that was uniquely suited for its open source nature.
- Designed and developed the caTIES website using JSPWiki, XHTML and CSS. Developed a JSPWiki template to give the website a more professional non-wiki look and feel consistent with the branding strategy.
- Presented caTIES at various national conferences and medical institutions across the country.
- Authored service contracts, requirements and design documents, testing plans, user manuals, tutorials and implementation plans.
- Provided paid consultation for customizing and deploying caTIES.
- Provided senior level user interface design and usability expertise to development teams in the department.
UI Architect - May 2004 to May 2005 (12 months)
Pathology Informatics, University of Pittsburgh
Responsible for user interface design, usability evaluation and coding of web applications.
- Designed and developed VirtualSlide – a web application for annotating and presenting diagnostic quality microscopic slide images in a virtual microscope as course work for medical students. Slide images were extremely large(1GB+) TIFFs that were served up to a custom Java viewer that enabled fast zooming upto 100x and panning across the entire image.
Team Size: 1, Technical Environment: Java Swing, JSP, Servlets, XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, Eclipse IDE, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Jasc Paintshop Pro, Sun ONE Server, Oracle 9i.
- Designed and developed ProtocolQuery – a web application for querying UI interaction logs for detecting usability problems. It used a clever architecture using nested frames, JavaScript and servlets to achieve AJAX like functionality that enabled real time content updates without refreshing the entire page.
Team Size: 1, Technical Environment: JSP, Servlets, XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, Eclipse IDE, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Jasc Paintshop Pro, Sun ONE Server, Oracle 9i.
- Held interviews for requirements gathering, lead requirements analysis and design meetings.
- Performed cognitive walkthroughs and think aloud usability testing for user interfaces.
- Utilized wireframes and rapid prototyping to design and present UI designs to users.
- Created technical design documents, user manuals and tutorials for applications.
Graduate Research Assistant Nov 2002 – April 2004
University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences
- Developed an online authoring tool for QuizPack - a system, to author and deliver Web-based dynamic parameterized quizzes for programming-related courses. The system uses a parameterized question approach to randomly generate programming questions that are compiled and run in real-time to determine the correct answer.
Team Size: 1, Technical Environment: JSP, Servlets, XHTML, CSS, Netbeans, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Jasc Paintshop Pro
- Designed and developed the Human Computer Interaction website for School of Information Sciences.
- Designed and developed the Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence Conference’s Online Publications Repository.
Team Size: 2, Technical Environment: JSP, Servlets, Microsoft SQL Server, XHTML, CSS, Netbeans, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Jasc Paintshop Pro
- Designed and developed websites for Decision Systems Lab and it’s GeNIE and SMILE software.
- Designed and developed a website for Dr. Weber’s Research Group.
- Authored tutorials and compiled Help documentation for the GeNIe 2 software
Research Assistant Dec 2001 – April 2002
Society for Applied Microwave Electronics Engineering and Research
- Developed REMOCOL – A Lighthouse Remote Monitoring and Control Software that monitored lighthouse system status over 8 variables and allowed operators to remotely configure various lighthouse sub-systems.
Team Size:3, Technical Environment: Visual C++, MFC, Visual Studio
- Designed and implemented digital communications protocol for wireless communication between lighthouse and remote control station.
- Built lighthouse simulator software to test REMOCOL through a RS232C connection.
- Designed and implemented user interface for REMOCOL
