Greg Nicholas Email & Phone Number

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

Us

Overseeing all aspects of software development for applications and tools that provide voice-based user interfaces on mobile and web platforms. Involved in strategic planning and directing product development.

I'm not actively seeking new projects at the moment, but I am available for general consulting. As an independent contractor, I’ve worked with many types of clients— from startup companies to university research labs—in various capacities including product consulting, architecture design, and engineering.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

Developed and maintained the technology supporting an online platform used by local businesses and organizations to promote happenings in their communities.

Re-engineered various back-end elements of the software infrastructure to increase efficiency, stability, and usability. Wrote a variety of scripts to expose useful back-end functionality for non-technical coworkers.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Us

I served as the primary IT administrator for an engineering contracting firm with over 100 employees. To automate the handling of hardware inventories, software upgrades/installations, troubleshooting, and other routine tasks, I wrote Powershell scripts that are capable of running remotely. I was also in charge of administering many servers for the office, including machines that provide domain, e-mail, Blackberry, firewall, and other services. In addition, I was responsible for maintaining hardware and handling miscellaneous technical support concerns for all employees.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

I aided the research team developing the ITSPOKE speech-based tutoring system. My main contribution was to help develop a system that could determine a student's emotional state from acoustic and linguistic qualities in their speech. I experimented with different feature extraction and classification techniques to improve prediction accuracy. In addition, my duties included processing speech and transcription files for a large corpus of dialogue.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

I contributed to initial research for the Attention Manager agent of the RADAR Cognitive Assistant (a workplace-oriented system whose purpose is to minimize cognitive load of employees by automating and/or aiding in common administrative tasks). The Attention Manager's purpose is to dynamically determine optimal times for interruptions (e.g. email notifications) to maximize efficiency. I developed “desktop sensors” to extract features from user activities like key presses, mouse clicks, etc. Using these features, I experimented with learning mechanisms to proactively determine optimal interruption times.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

In this internship, I worked with full time employees as a systems programmer in the Accounting & Finance Department. My primary tasks were to integrate data from newly acquired plants into US Steel’s Oracle databases using PL/SQL and make changes to internal applications using Powerbuilder. One impact I made was to write several Unix scripts on my own initiative that automated many tedious data loading processes that had been done manually in the past.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

I coordinated with 19 other resident assistants collectively responsible for supervising 745 first-year students. Through my duties, I interacted with many outside agencies, including the Pitt Police, City of Pittsburgh Paramedics, the Office of Residence Life, Housing Office, and other University departments in regards to resident concerns.

M.S., Computer Science

B.S., Computer Science, Psychology, & Mathematics