Alan D. Email & Phone Number

New York, Ny, Us

New York, Ny, Us

I work on the Robot Development Kit, which runs on the robot itself to interact with the hardware directly. Most of my work is in Go.I've specialized in the board interactions within the RDK: whether they're running on a Raspberry Pi or a Jetson Orin or anything in between, my work is how users interact with the GPIO pins, PWM output, I2C bus, SPI bus, how you receive interrupts, etc. I've also added a handful of other sensor components (humidity, temperature, acceleration, angular velocity, etc.).

New York, Us

I worked on the core server, which is responsible for approving and declining credit card authorizations, creating new cards, and similar functionality. The core server is written in C++ with a Python test suite, but upcoming projects are written in Rust.I increased the throughput of this server by several orders of magnitude, through a combination of parallelizing the computations, profiling and optimizing SQL queries, and offloading ancillary work to other servers. This has enabled other members of the team to add new functionality, enabling the company to offer new products to our customers. I also created the system which automatically detects and blocks PAN enumeration attacks. We are attacked multiple times per week, and my work stops fraud and prevents users from panicking about stolen cards, while freeing up employees’ time to focus on other issues.I created the security boundaries which prevent business customers from leaking data to each other about what their individual users are doing. Each SQL query in the core server is automatically parsed and rewritten to restrict itself to only the data that the current instance is allowed to view, which lets the other programmers on the team code as though they have access to the entire database without worrying about leaking data.

Hebron, Kentucky, Us

I was the head of the Systems Team. We designed and implemented the systems that run on the next generation of our robotic key-cutting kiosk, touching nearly every facet of the machine. We got independent subsystems to communicate in a multi-process, multithreaded architecture. Most of my work was in Python.I owned most of the code behind the peripheral devices: the fingerprint reader, credit card reader, transponder reader for car keys, battery backup system, etc. I also worked on the process health monitoring, logs analysis framework, inter-process communication system, etc. I built a Hadoop-like distributed computation system over our fleet of kiosks, which is used to aggregate diagnostic data. I joke that my team is in charge of everything on the kiosk except scanning and cutting keys.I also founded the company library and lunchtime reading group. We typically read books about Python and software development.

St Paul, Mn, Us

Conducted research on sensor networks. Designed and wrote firmware for embedded sensors. The sensors communicated with each other via Bluetooth Low Energy protocol. Carried out a week-long field trial in which the system was tested around our office, and analyzed the data as a proof of concept system.

Durham, North Carolina, Us

Taught 3 sections of recitation/lab for the Introduction to Programming class, including about 70students each semester. Starting in late September, was responsible for creating the content of lab. Graded lab work; held office hours. Starting in October, gave weekly supplemental lectures. Winner of the Duke CS “Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award,” 2010–2011.The course was in the middle of being completely redone. This was the first semester it was taught in Python (previous semesters had been in Java), and the profs needed to redo much of the coursework to better suit the new language. This is how I was able to have such a big impact on the course material: after the professors grew to trust my abilities, they were willing to give me larger pieces of the course to create. For instance, I showed them how Python supported list comprehensions, which lead to an entire lab about list comprehensions. Eventually, they could come to me with a high level idea like "make a lab about the word game Mad Libs," and I could turn that into 90 minutes of hands-on material.The course webpages for the two semesters are at:http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/cps006/fall10/http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/cps006/spring11/I created most of the Labs section and bits and pieces of the rest of the curriculum.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

Spent two years working on a backend for AdSense For Domains, and two years on a backend to a server that kept track of AdSense traffic. Worked mainly in C++, Sawzall (a logs analysis programming language created at Google), and Python. Built the system to remove kited domains from AFD, which indirectly lead to ICANN cracking down on domain kiting.

Claremont, California, Ca, Us

Tutored and graded homework for the Introduction to Algorithms class. Held office hours, held review sessions before tests.

Claremont, Ca, Us

Worked on a team of 4 students to build an autonomous, low-budget robot to participate in the Scavenger Hunt competition at the annual AAAI conference. We won 2 awards, published 3 papers, and gave several presentations on our work.

B.S., Mathematics And Computer Science

Master'S Degree, Computer Science