Programming: Java (6yrs), Perl (5 yrs). Currently prefer Ruby (4 years). Also dabbled in Python. Competent in C/C++. My first programming language was M68k assembler. Extensively used and maintained CVS and Perforce. SQL, mainly with MySQL servers.

System administration: Years of experience with mainly Linux systems. Configuration and administration of various system services. Proficient in shell programming.

Web: Created apps with Ruby on Rails, Servlets/JSP, and CGI.pm. Experience with XSL transforms.

Languages: Russian, Spanish, Farsi.

Active in the Open Source community (Debian, Ruby-related projects).

Aug 2006 - present Voxify Corporation
Voice User Interface analyst.

• Worked on voice interface projects for major companies in Hotel, Airline, Health care, Retail, and Mail Order spaces.
• Design, tuning and deployment of Call Steering, Catalog Request, Order Status, FAQ, and Lead Capture voice applications.
• Quantitative and usability analysis of deployed applications, leading to higher completion rates and reduced call durations.
• Initiated and led a research group which grew to 4 people. Research topics included audio rendering of currency, dates, and digit strings in English, French, and Arabic, UI issues in capturing personal data, data-driven confirmation strategies, and competitive analysis. Preparation of articles and abstracts for trade publications and conferences.
• Created a suite of data mining, visualization, and analytics tools (written in Ruby) to study caller behavior and better focus tuning efforts.
• Created a suite of tools (written in Ruby) to perform off-line grammar regression. Applied this suite to a multi-accent and multi-lingual (US, UK, AU, Indian accents of English; Arabic) airline fare information system (with call centers in Dubai, Manchester, Melbourne and New York), generating grammars that in some cases increased the accuracy by a factor of 2 over the baseline.
• Wrote design documents to influence strategic development decisions, participated in patent application process.
• Wrote a time-tracking web application (with Ruby on Rails) with a charting and querying interface.

• Designed, implemented, and maintained the production build system/release manager on top of Perforce and MySQL with a web interface via Java Servlets running on Tomcat. The system manages versions for thousands of build dependencies and offers complete reproducibility. It is used for all official builds.
• Installed and maintained Bugzilla (a bug tracker written in Perl); implemented non-trivial on-site extensions; tracked the vendor branch and submitted enhancements upstream.
• Worked on automatic recognition of name-spellings. Constructed statistical models from name databases, implemented 2-nd order n-best Viterbi decoder (first in Ruby, then in Java), created transcription web-app with Ruby on Rails. Was able to improve performance from below 50% to around 80%.
• QAed voice applications

Mar 2000 - Nov 2001 iSpheres Corporation
Java developer and UNIX sysadmin. Served as an interface between IT and Engineering.
As a sysadmin:

• Was responsible for network security and Cisco firewall & router maintenance, uptime of servers and production machines, smooth functioning of the development UNIX cluster (some 30-odd Linux and 5 Solaris machines). Maintained all manner of UNIX services. Built RAID servers.
• Maintained company-wide intranet webserver (Apache) and created a website to make IT information easily accessible to others.
• Set up and maintained Bugzilla
• Maintained Exchange and DHCP on Windows NT.

• Worked with the R&D group on implementation of an information extracting engine that would automatically learn structure from documents.
• Participated in design and development of a control server that accepted remote commands to start, stop, and query processes.
• Maintained and extended product installation and Oracle configuration scripts.
• Carried out the porting of the product from a Linux environment to Solaris and HP-UX.
• Developed a regular expression matcher in Java with better functionality than available alternatives.
• Created GUIs with AWT and Swing.
• Proposed, designed, and created a tool for complex queries into CVS, correlating with the bug database. It had a CGI interface and was written in Perl.

Jan 1999 - Mar 2000 Center for Advanced Computer Research, California Institute of Technology.
Supercomputer Laboratory Operator. Responsible for routine operation and maintenance of supercomputers, especially Intel Paragon, HP Exemplar, and Linux Beowulf systems. Developed scripts to automate monitoring tasks.

Mar 1999 - Mar 2000 Dabney House, Caltech.
Assistant Computer Controller. Maintained Linux and Windows systems in a college dorm. Dealt with network security issues. Assisted students with their personal computers.

BA (Linguistics major, Symbolic Systems minor) Dec 2007 from Stanford University
Coursework in Computational Linguistics: NLP techniques, web search and mining, information retrieval, computational semantics, parsing, voice applications, algorithms. Also: Syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, logic, artificial intelligence, mathematics, philosophy. Additional coursework in Linguistics (general, historical, phonetics) at UC Berkeley (Jan 2003 - Jun 2004).

Sep 1998 - Mar 2000 California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Applied & Computational Mathematics major. Coursework in pure & applied mathematics, statistics, computer science, physics.

Jun 1997 - May 1998 Oregon State University
Took advanced mathematics courses while attending high school.

Jan 2008 Voxify People's Choice Award. Cited for "brilliance at data analysis".