Michael Brazier Email & Phone Number

FTE at McKesson Physician Practice Solutions, developing Practice Partner, a medical records software package.

• Debugged issues reported by customers in the Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems, and developed hotfix packages to resolve them. Examples:o An interaction between Plug and Play, Volume Manager and Group Policy Manager allowed users to circumvent a policy denying access to removable disk drives, by plugging in the drive between system boot time and login. I wrote a fix to Group Policy Manager to check the registry for access restrictions to drives, which was accepted and ported into the Windows 7 codebase.o The iSCSI Initiator service was not reporting targets on an iSCSI device made by LSI. I used WinDbg to track the data sent between the initiator and the target device, and found that the target device reported its available targets as ASCII strings, while the initiator expected to receive strings encoded in UTF-16.o A race condition in the Volume Shadow Copy service was causing a volume backup to fail if a second backup of that drive, running in parallel, completed during a certain phase of the first backup. With VSS trace logs, I traced the issue to a read/write Boolean in the service’s internal data structures that was not thread-safe, and protected it in a critical section.• Contributed code to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and 2, in utilities for NTFS (ChkDsk and icacls), the volsnap driver, and the VDS and VSS services.• Served integral role in development of DfsDiag, a tool to analyze installations of Distributed File System and report configuration issues to the administrator. The development team translated a prior version of the tool written in C into C++, converting it into an object-oriented design, and refactored the code to make it unit testable, reading mock DFS configurations from an XML file. I was the main advocate for this design decision, and implemented the code supporting it. I also wrote the tool’s report generator to create HTML pages with embedded Javascript.

• Developed Matrix Determinant Interpolator (http://www.chtcherba.com/arthur/Projects/MatDetInterp/), a program to compute determinants of matrices of multivariate polynomials by means of polynomial interpolation. Written in C++, compiled as a Windows console application and as a Unix application. Technical problems solved during implementation:o Parsing and interpreting input files written in a subset of the syntax of Maple programs, using GNU Flex and Bisono Implementing efficient modular arithmetico Representing sparse multivariate polynomials and sparse matrices, and implementing Gaussian elimination for matrices of polynomialso Implementing the Fast Fourier Transform over finite fieldso Solving Vandermonde systems of linear equations in O(N log2 N) time, using an FFT-based algorithm by Kaltofen & Yagatio Interpolating univariate polynomials, by Newton’s method or by solving a Vandermonde system of linear equationso Implementing Zippel’s algorithm for interpolation of sparse multivariate polynomialso Extending Zippel’s algorithm to study the effects of changing the order of variable interpolation, and of introducing homogenizing variableso Generalizing Zippel’s algorithm to allow interpolation of several variables in a single step• Developed Resultant Matrix Constructor, a program to compute resultant matrices for systems of polynomials. Written in C++, compiled as a Windows console application and as a Unix application. Technical problems solved during implementation:o Parsing input files containing systems of polynomials, written in XMLo Constructing resultants (matrices of multivariate polynomials) for systems of polynomials, using a choice of algorithms: Macaulay resultant, Dixon resultant, Dixon lambda resultant, or Dixon dialytic resultant

Web site development and maintenance for the School of Engineering and Computer Science, UTPA. Used CGI programming in Perl and a MySQL database as backing store to support the Web site.

• Re-designed and maintained database in Microsoft Access that tracked progress of system installations and service calls, tracked technicians’ hours worked, handled inventory control, linked to the system installations database• Wrote program to transfer data between databases above and Solomon IV accounting system• Provided technical support for company LAN and Windows computers

Master Of Science, Computer Science

Thesis: "An Improvement and a Generalization of Zippel's Sparse Multivariate Polynomial Interpolation Algorithm" Distinguished software.

Bachelor Of Science, Mathematics