👨‍💻 Alan Au Email & Phone Number

Kirkland, Wa, Us

Kirkland, Wa, Us

I'm currently seeking tabletop publishing contracts; sell sheets available if you have a serious inquiry. I'm also available to consult on projects using my very specialized skill set and domain experience, but you'll need an introduction from one of my direct contacts (if you aren't one).

I'm open to chatting about potential opportunities that focus on my strengths in coordination, collaboration, and communication. I'm also able to leverage my domain experience in programming, data science, and user research. I also have experience in both healthcare and the game industry, with a focus on the human side of the experience.Please note that I will decline contact requests if you do not remove the emoji from my name.

Redmond, Washington, Us

As part of the Forza Horizon team, I utilized data-driven insights to help the design and engineering teams understand the potential impact of changes to the game product.Some highlights:- Coordinated between stakeholders across the business, production, and design teams to extract insights about player purchasing patterns for add-on content. This is part of an ongoing effort to more effectively surface add-on offerings to players at appropriate times in the player journey.- Performed data-driven analysis to drive game balance adjustments for the competitive "Eliminator" game mode in Forza Horizon 5. Through close collaboration with the design team, these recommendations will be deployed as part of a pending live service update.

Redmond, Washington, Us

As part of the Azure Open Source Software team, I focused on using data-driven insights to direct engineering efforts, with the goal of improving performance and availability of PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB on Azure.Some highlights:- Coordinated development and deployment of a telemetry-based system to detect high database-usage patterns and issue upgrade recommendations to Azure customers, in conjunction with partners on the "Azure Advisor" team. My work included defining metrics, determining business logic, and detecting customer activity levels. This was attributed to a cumulative $400k increase in monthly subscription revenue over a 1 year period.- Designed and coordinated development of a predictive system to detect periods of idle database activity, allowing for optimization of resources through automatic downscaling, and to reduce performance impact of maintenance tasks. My contribution included design and specification of the detection algorithm and tracking system to monitor effectiveness, and coordinating with partner-team engineers to deploy into production.

Provided coding assistance to facilitate data ingestion and preparation, such as handling imbalanced data. Adapted existing neural network code to provide predictive analysis on a cyber-security dataset.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Implemented a random forest regression model using Python scikit-learn to help indie game developers set competitive market prices. This included construction of a custom dataset using API calls and HTML scraped from the web. The tool was deployed publicly, using a Flask web application to run the model and display results using Amazon AWS.

Seattle, Wa, Us

Conducted user experience research to develop interface prototypes for a software package, which was being designed to visually display data to assist public health communicable disease investigators. This included the direct application of usability research methods, such as think-aloud observations and focus group sessions. Collected data was used to generate software functional requirements and refine the user interface.Designed and implemented custom software using R and its Shiny package to administer a research study to 166 participants on how data quantity affects how people visually interpret and analyze data. This included the development of custom web-based survey software to visually display study materials and capture analytic data. The results confirmed a relationship between data complexity, how long it took to interpret the data, and user confidence in the results of their analysis.

Worked at various startups in the greater Seattle area, including a health technology startup and an office productivity software startup. Designed a usability test plan, assembled technical specifications, and managed a three-person software engineering team at a health technology startup to build a mobile application for helping women ages 25-50 manage their stress and anxiety.Additionally, served as the chief technologist at a four-person startup building web-enabled office software. Selected development tools and technologies used by the company, including source control and bug-tracking tools, development languages, and web communication standards.

Seattle, Wa, Us

Designed, evaluated, and deployed a new tool for capturing data during in-hospital cardiac arrest emergencies. This included experimental design of a within-subjects study, statistical data analysis of quantitative results, thematic coding of qualitative results, and project management to coordinate between physicians, nurses, and hospital administration. The results improved usability and reinforced best care practices to reduce risk management costs and improve patient outcomes.During my time at the hospital's surgical simulation center, I also designed and built a low-fidelity training simulation as part of a professional education curriculum used to train urology residents.As part of my research training, I conducted academic research into ontology alignment as applied to representations of cellular structure. This included the use of natural language processing algorithms. The results of my work were presented at the national meeting of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Authored a series of commercial product reviews, interviews, and long-form articles covering the 60 billion dollar per year videogame industry for outlets such as The Escapist and Three Moves Ahead. Additionally, provided copyediting, content validation, and solution checking for college level mathematics textbooks covering algebra, trigonometry, and basic statistics for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Wilmington, Delaware, Us

I designed an automated patent preparation system to allow for efficient processing of patentable discoveries. This was implemented as a distributed server architecture to conduct parallel processing of large gene sequence datasets using a proprietary in-house computing cluster.In addition, I architected and managed implementation of an intellectual property tracking system and its underlying data model, which enabled scientists and lawyers to focus on creating content instead of document preparation.

As part of the Lotus cc:Mail division located in Mountain View, CA (prior to its acquisition by IBM), I was responsible for post-release development, bug fixes, and custom modifications to the database tools and network routing software using C and C++. This involved accommodating user requests from major corporate customers and balancing them against in-house production priorities.

Phd, Biomedical Informatics

Scientiae Baccalaureus, Computer Science/Electrical Engineering