Other Projects

WebSphere EJB routing: As a member of the workload management team in the WebSphere group at at IBM, I conceived and prototyped a policy for routing enterprise java beans that makes use of the number of outstanding requests from each servlet server. This work was done shortly before I began my Ph.D. studies, but I understand that it has since become an essential routing policy in the product.

Visual relationships: For a semester project for a software engineering course, I worked on a team that implemented a fully functional spreadsheet program. As a part of this project, I conceived a visual dependency toggle. The spreadsheet could be set in dependency mode, in which it would highlight all (recursive) dependencies of a selected cell or group of cells, by highlighting those cells that formula within the selected cell(s) depended on in one color, and those cells that the depended on the selected cell(s) with a second color.

Baritone: As an undergraduate, I was a baritone in the Iowa State Singers. The largest crowd I have performed a solo (from the opera Porgy and Bess) in front of was ~1000 at C.Y.Stephens auditorium in Ames. I have also occasionally performed in musical theatre, including Kiss Me Kate, Pippin, and The Secret Garden.

The n-queens problem: In a project that extended from an AI class into a scientific computing class, I created a parallel solver for the n-Queens problem that combined highly constrained search with randomization to solve the problem very quickly. An interesting property of the problem is that the number of solutions grows exponentially with the search space, but the solutions are not distributed equally among the branches of the search tree, making it advantageous to restart the search periodically.

Scan Line Rendering software: In my off hours of my first internship at IBM in quality assurance circa 1999, I wrote from scratch (using Direct2D as the canvas), a scan line 3-D rendering engine - including scene description, navigation, multiple light sources, face coloring, and texturing.