Brian Buckley Email and Phone Number

I currently work in Grünenthal's global commercial excellence team (COMEX) where we design, build and operate statistical machine learning algorithms to deliver both inference and prediction in order to refine our pharma commercial activities. My team is fully remote and we are geographically spread throughout the EU and UK. Although we work fully remote we meet in person regularly, recently in Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, Paris in France and at our company HQ in Aachen, Germany.

During my tenure at Novartis I delivered 12 real-world non-interventional observational studies covering a number of disease areas that include neuroscience, oncology and cardiovascular. I am co-author on two papers (see publications section).I have detailed knowledge of several secondary data sources including IBM MarketScan, Optum EHR and Insurance claims, UK CPRD, several disease registries and I am a registered UK Biobank researcher. I was one of a small team of internal experts in the mapping of RWD sources to the OHDSI OMOP data model and have taken part in several EHDEN studiesI co-developed a Psoriasis study with the Novartis Sweden country organization using a Swedish Dept. of Health patient registry that produced meaningful analytic insights for the Novartis Sweden organization. I introduced auto-ML machine learning as an additional unbiased analysis arm for several observational studies.I designed and delivered several training programmes in RWD, statistics and machine learning for colleagues in other teams and junior/graduate members of my own team.I am an expert-level programmer in R and Python and experienced level in C++ and SAS. I have designed and delivered several RShiny dashboards and I can deliver Python dashboards in Dash and Streamlit. I am also experienced with SQL both on RDBMS and NoSQL systems.

As a part-time lecturer at the School of Computing I am registered to teach the following modules:H9ADM Advanced Data Mining:http://courses.ncirl.ie/index.cfm/page/module/moduleId/20372H8BDA Business Data Analysis:http://courses.ncirl.ie/index.cfm/page/module/moduleId/20593H8MACL Machine Learning:http://courses.ncirl.ie/index.cfm/page/module/moduleId/68041I have temporarily suspended my teaching while I work for my doctorate but I intend to return to teaching when I complete my PhD. Many of my students are international people seeking to gain skills to improve their lives and those of their families. It is the most incredible feeling of meaningfulness seeing some hundreds of people whom I helped live better lives through education. Teaching will always be a major focus of my life.

I established the first phase in Technology IT for a new analytics practice at Vodafone Ireland focusing on Big Data. This included technology selection (Cloudera EDH, Kafka & NiFi), analytics use case definition process with a standards focus (https://www.tmforum.org/ai-data-analytics/), source data discovery process and analytics model techniques (primarily R and Python).I initiated a grass-roots community of analytics practitioners with the aim of running agile experiments on correlated data usually siloed within different business units. This community grew from three to fourteen members in the first four months after establishment and was handed over to my successor before I left.I worked closely with the mobile network strategy team and actively contributed to Vodafone's membership of the CeADAR university research partnership. In this context I sourced and processed sentiment data for use with two research prototypes, one of which was granted funding to bring into a production pilot based on my demonstration to Vodafone Group Technology. This was a customer sentiment inference model using data obtained from customer feedback for net promoter scoring which we aimed to create a real time ‘hot’ topic trend identifier for customer support.I held the key data architect role for Vodafone Ireland’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) programme of work.

I established the first (Human) Learning Analytics function at HMH. This was a cross-functional matrix team of subject matter experts who came together at working group sessions to lay out the data science questions and expected outcomes for the technical team. My technical team included a Harvard-trained Data Scientist whom I hired for our Boston office. I also hired two graduate summer interns to help kick-start this new capability in 2015, one located in Boston and one located in Dublin. Overall I hired 14 solution and data architects for my team, 5 in Boston and 9 in Dublin.I was the Technology Group's technical lead for Mergers and Acquisitions and was the technical due diligence member of the core team for the 2015 $500+ Million Scholastic Ed-tech acquisition. I also led the technical validation of the partnership with Knewton Adaptive Learning for our Personal Math Trainer product to predict student success and alert teachers for students who require remediation early in their learning.I evangelized adoption of technology standards for HMH and was the lead member of the IMS Global organization representing HMH. I also represented HMH on the SIF Association North America Management Board for 2015 (now Access 4 Learning).

I was the overall technical authority for the Sage CRM product covering core product architecture and all deployment scenarios as well as Development Partner APIs. I created, designed and implemented (together with my hugely talented team) an innovative architecture to obtain many of the OPEX TCO benefits of SAAS multi-tenancy without needing to re-design the product given it had over 2 million lines of code developed over 10 years with over 10,000 customer users. This solution, based on elastic application deployment in real-time, was deployed in a new Rackspace Data Centre in December 2011 and is the fundamental design for www.sagecrm.com, a completely new and lucrative business for Sage Group.During my time with Sage I transformed the product in Version 7 with a new Java technology stack (Spring Framework & Hibernate) but continued commitment to the Microsoft stack (especially IIS7 and Windows Power Shell as well as a focus on Azure)Sage CRM now includes wide support for the SData API initiative (http://sdata.sage.com). I also fully supported deployment of Sage CRM in the Amazon EC2 Cloud and mentored in-house teams and business partners on the approach. Before I left Sage I engineered the product to deploy into the Microsoft Azure Cloud through my work with the UK Microsoft Technology Centre.

I delivered technical architecture and technology selection for the Babelgum Business Systems Integration infrastructure platform. Babelgum was an Internet TV broadcaster (IPTV). It was at the time (2008) the second largest pure IPTV Company in the world (after Joost).I was responsible for defining and driving the overall integration architecture for all company business systems. These included our Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Monetisation (payments & billing), Advertising, Contract Management and Management Reporting systems.I was responsible for building relationships between the Dublin Development team and our colleagues in the Nice and Milan Development teams. This included aligning the architecture and interfaces of their systems with our business systems. The Nice team were responsible for the run-time video IPTV platform and the Milan team were responsible for the Content Management System (CMS) and Advertising Platform.I defined a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) built upon an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with Web Services and binary JMS as the transport mechanisms.I started an activity to compare ESB products from Oracle (Fusion Middleware), IBM (Websphere ESB) and BEA (AquaLogic Service Bus) with the objective of deciding the long-term ESB technology for Babelgum.

The scope of my role included Requirements Analysis, Architecture, Design, Implementation and Deployment to automate Seed Testing at the Seed Test Station located at the State Laboratory Campus.I was responsible for driving all technical aspects of this green field development, from customer requirements capture, database design using Oracle Designer, application design including technology selection and engineering process, liaison with Operations colleagues for live deployment and mentoring/coaching all other members of the team as well as defining end user training documentation for the system.I researched J2EE EJB3.0 as a de jure standard replacement for the existing Spring Framework and Oracle Toplink as a performance enhancement to replace Hibernate. Both technologies are being adopted throughout the organisation following my successful demonstration of the benefits, given that the Department was already heavily invested in Oracle technology.

My role was responsible for Architecture, Design and Implementation of production-level web-tier products.I was the Principal Engineer for the AOL Shopping channel, inStore (shopping.aol.com) and the Modular Search Results Platform (MSRP) subsequently deployed on AOL Search (search.aol.com).My role also involved planning of tasks and technical management of a group of 3 senior engineers. I was also involved with hiring new employees to the team.A substantial part of my job was to attend and contribute to multi-site architecture and design meetings. These meetings were held both in the Dublin site teleconferencing suite as well as in AOL Dulles, VA headquarters and the Bangalore Development Centre.

I was responsible for delivering the design and implementation of GSM mobile Base Station Controller (BSC) components in C++ (GCC on Linux, Forte 6 on Solaris and MS Visual Studio 6 on Windows). I was responsible for the design and implementation of the BSC Management Agent IDL interface to the OMC and third party applications for Configuration and Event Management.I designed and implemented Java CORBA clients using JacORB and the JDK built-in ORB as well as Iona Orbacus. I designed a craft terminal application in Java Swing.I designed and implemented an innovative Java API BSC interface for third-party integrators not familiar with CORBA. The company productized this API for licence to customers following its successful use in T-Mobile USA to integrate IP Access into their Network Management system based on Netcool.I ported the CORBA Management Agent from Orbacus to ACE TAO and used the Asynchronous Method Invocation messaging model (AMI) available in TAO to improve the real-time operational performance of the BSC.

I was responsible for the architecture, design and implementation of the evolution of Spectel’s voice and data conferencing systems with special emphasis on the Web-Tier and application API layer.I conducted technology feasibility/cost studies, researched technology solutions and advised management on subsequent opportunities or threats to the business.I implemented Spectel's next-generation web portal to the conferencing systems using Apache Cocoon.I assisted Product Management at pre-sales meetings with customers. In particular, I acted as Technical Authority for the Web-tier at a meeting in Oslo with Telenor. I also helped win a contract with Genesys Conferencing UK by allaying the company’s concerns with certain Security aspects of our system.I designed and implemented a web thin-client real-time conferencing application using browser-side AJAX together with browser-side XML transformation (using MSXML on IE and Transformiix on Mozilla). It was delivered on time within very aggressive timescales (Feb – June 2003 from concept to system test).

Iona asked me back to contribute to the improvement of the Orbix 3.3 for C++/Java product line. The work included refactoring and enhancement of new features added to 3.3 from the 3.0 product line, investigating and fixing interworking issues with Orbix 3.3 for Java and Orbix 2000, as well as interworking issues with the CORBA services (Naming, Event, Notification services, etc).I ported Orbix 3.3 for C++ to Solaris 2.8, Forte Developer 6 update 1 including the version 5.2 compiler. I used the Appcert tool to discover and fix forwards compatibility issues with the code base.

I was the Technical Team Leader for the CORBA Bridge Feature of the GSM OMC. This was a middle-tier mediation device bridging OMC Java clients with OSP MIB servers within a system distributed over a number of HPUX 11.0 machines.I successfully conducted a feasilibility study to port the CORBA infrastructure to JacORB clients and ACE TAO real-time server. I implemented Load Balancing of replicated CORBA Bridge servers for the BOA version. I was responsible for the design of the CORBA Bridge subsystem for a new OMC feature (FM-GUI). UML was used to document the analysis with use-cases and sequence diagrams. Sybase was the back-end database.I worked on a feasibility study for the next-generation OMC that was to be implemented in J2EE (EJB) using Iona's IPortal Application Server. The study involved implementing one event handling and one configuration management component end-to-end. This involved implementing and deploying an entity bean and a number of stateless session beans.

I was the Technical Team Leader for the Orbix runtime module (communications stack and marshalling operation). The job involved assigning and managing work in the runtime module to three engineers. It was my responsibility to plan and track delivery of work and to gather and monitor metrics for team efficiency and the quality of the work.I was also the technical authority on the runtime code. The code base repository and build system was Clearcase. Multiple releases of Orbix were maintained for multiple operating systems (primarily Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, OSF, IRIX and Windows NT).Design refactoring and enhancement of the core Orbix C++ product. I refactored the Orbix daemon functionality with special focus on the checkpointing function. The checkpointing function enables persistent control over active Orbix servers in the implementation repository. UML was used for the design analysis incorporating class diagrams, use-cases and sequence diagrams.I spent 2 weeks with Lucent Technologies in Columbus Ohio, US to analyse, locate and solve a complex problem they were having with an Orbix implementation of a Service Management Telecommunications system. I solved the problem to the customer's satisfaction and in doing so became the first engineer to build Orbix off-site.

The work involved development, integration and testing of functional enhancements to the Nokia NMS-100 Network Management System, which was used for management of SDH fixed networks (STM-1 to STM-16 nodes).My team was responsible for adaptations to the SDH Q3 (CMISE) server and associated communications sub-systems as well as the relevant database schemas.The role involved close collaboration with colleagues in Düsseldorf and Helsinki, which included working at these sites for short periods.

The objective of this project was System Test Automation for a major delivery of the ServiceView for Telemarketing Services Intelligent Network (IN) product. This product allowed service providers of special services phone numbers (e.g. 0800, 0345, 0990 numbers etc) to manage the day-to-day operation of their call centers. My role was to assist System Test by automating test procedures, developing Mercury Interactive WinRunner scripts for the client application and SQL and Unix scripts for preparing test data for the server. Performance and stress testing of the server was performed using C test scripts compiled with the Performix for Oracle SQL*Net toolset.

As a real-time engineer, I was responsible for the design and development of the Ionica Fixed Radio Access basestation element manager (ASEM). This was an embedded (VRTX) system consisting of a Q Adaptor with Management Information Base (MIB).I worked in a team of 7 software engineers. The Clearcase tool supported development and release management. SparcWorks CodeManager supported the first year of development. Yourdon was used to document the analysis.

As a fundamental part of my BT Graduate Engineer training, I was responsible for designing components of the Event and Test Management System (ETMS). ETMS development involved C and later C++ (Gnu and XLC++) on the Sun SPARC platform (later ported to IBM AIX). Workflow analysis and use case discovery was used for conversion of telecommunications testing processes from manual to automated systems.I also led the deployment analysis and pilot trial design for automated telecommunications testing systems in several service centres around the greater London area.