Thomas Madden Email & Phone Number

Dearborn, Michigan, Us

* Architecting and implementing the in-vehicle infotainment and instrument cluster display systems for Ford's next generation of electric vehicles.

Dearborn, Michigan, Us

* Selected by new executive leadership to be the HMI improvement lead of an EV-specific task force that consisted of cross-functional manufacturing, purchasing, and vehicle quality partners. Was given the stated goal to make radical improvements to Mach-E and F-150 Lightening HMI.* Assembled a team consisting of software engineering and digital design team members. Orchestrated complete ideation, benchmarking/teardown, quality data, and ran executive review & feedback sessions. Collected and distilled data into a prioritized set of critical improvements to be delivered to customers via HMI * Ran UX design and engineering sprints to design and implement improvements across multiple releases. Personally reviewed and authored parts of the HMI codebase.* This work resulted in numerous improvements delivered to customers via over-the-air updates, including: performance and responsiveness improvements, larger, more usable CarPlay/Android Auto, all-new climate controls (including using the software-controlled physical rotary knob to control climate functions), simplified vehicle settings and controls, and a simplified navigation bar with a persistent camera button.* The improvements suggested, designed, and implemented during this time resulted in measurable improvement in JD Power Difficult To Use (DTU) for several key areas of the system and a lot of press attention: https://www.motortrend.com/news/ford-f-150-lightning-ota-knob-update/ https://electrek.co/2023/01/06/ford-finds-unique-knob-control-solution-in-new-mach-e-ota-update/https://www.kbb.com/car-news/update-gives-mustang-mach-e-drivers-a-physical-knob-for-temperature/https://insideevs.com/news/629850/ford-mustang-mach-e-volume-knob-temperature/https://www.teslarati.com/ford-knob-climate-control-mustang-mach-e/.

Dearborn, Michigan, Us

* Lead the initial efforts to transition Ford's HMI development to Android Automotive OS running on as a virtual machine in a hypervisor on top of a QNX host OS.* Was an early developer on the platform. Found, reported, and fixed many developer workflow issues. Worked with the appropriate teams to ensure that they were actioned before the bulk of the teams moved over.* Refined the specification authoring process to narrowly define what specifications were. Authored specification and strategy documents surrounding Ford's implementation of Android theming and application development approach.* Served as the main contact between software engineering and the digital design teams for most questions involving Android's inherent application and interaction model, process structure, Google GAS/CDD requirements, Google Maps, and interaction questions. * Worked with Studio and UX suppliers to formalize the plan to lock down the display-independent sizes and proportions of the System UI and app areas across all displays in the catalog. Created Android Automotive OS System UI fork, authored new System UI components to meet design specifications.* Developed the low-level rendering surface layouts to support efficient rendering that meets all functional safety and regulatory requirements. Authored the design document, wrote requirements, worked with teams and suppliers to implement.* Collaborated with the design team to specify the software components that contribute to the visual composition of content displayed in both the panoramic and traditional instrument cluster displays. Authored the overview document, wrote requirements, worked with the teams to staff the effort. Authored the initial components that manage the Android-drawn parts of the instrument cluster displays.

Dearborn, Michigan, Us

* Drove the SYNC 4.0a system for 2021 Mustang Mach-E from concept to production.* Designed and authored technical specifications related to several core aspects of SYNC 4.0a UX including: the on-screen rotary knob event flow/audio control, application lifecycle, system restore, power state handling, and background application management ("dashcards"). * Established the new teams' automated software build, release & versioning processes. Created the initial Jenkins CI clusters and build pipelines.* Designed and implemented a high-performance signaling mechanism based on MQTT to expose nearly four thousand signals from the existing platform middleware to a distributed Javascript-based HMI. Created a unified MQTT topic structure and calling convention.* Created internal tools to manage the signal creation and change process as well as to help developers develop and debug HMI signaling code. This included generating Flow types to help ensure type safety when utilizing the vehicle signals from Javascript code.* Assisted teams in application process design, performance analysis, vehicle signaling troubleshooting.* Provided design and implementation review for new software components and features. Filed nearly one thousand implementation stories.

Dearborn, Michigan, Us

• Led software development team members that were co-located with UX and design studio personnel to collaboratively develop a new infotainment HMI concept for an upcoming Ford vehicle. Lead the combined team into a cooperative "prototype, review, repeat” cadence. This concept was built in three months, approved for production, won special recognition, presented at Ford’s leadership conference, highlighted in global town hall meeting, and was included in a Forbes magazine article (https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2018/09/06/ford-ceo-james-hackett-under-fire-from-wall-street-shows-forbes-the-early-fruits-of-his-turnaround-plan/)• Selected a ReactJS/CSS/HTML-based stack for HMI concept development. These technologies accelerated the prototyping and review process, enabled the team to pull from a larger developer talent pool, and made it easy to demonstrate the benefits of a fully connected vehicle.• Worked with the OS, vehicle middleware, and core architecture teams to put software requirements in place to turn the concept into reality. Developed a method for connecting a Web-based stack to an existing infotainment platform by adapting existing vehicle signaling specifications to Web-compatible network protocols and data payloads. • Collaborated with Ford design studio team members to develop compression techniques to maximize video quality of animation and image scene files at a fraction of their previous file size. These efforts enabled advanced vehicle imagery and animations to be contained in the limited amount of flash storage available in the infotainment hardware module.• Formed a new HMI development team with developers from Ford’s purchase of Blackberry’s handset division. Worked with management to define the mission and goals of the team. Helped team understand those goals and translate into a plan of action that coalesced around a small set of deliverables for the next generation of infotainment software.

Cupertino, California, Us

• Manage the team responsible for the Mac OS X version of Keynote. Triage and prioritize incoming bugs, user feedback, feature requests, executive / marketing requests, and design tasks. Work with several geographically distributed engineering teams to solve common technical issues, resolve schedule dependencies, and set feature roadmaps.• Authored several key features for the iWork application suite including the toolbar & inspector UI architecture, customizable presenter display, and the animation inspection UI. Designed the first version of the extensible document model for the HTML export feature used by Keynote’s Mac OS X app and the web player. Fixed bugs throughout the application and shared iWork frameworks.• Worked with all iWork teams to develop the hierarchical build configuration scheme to build the Mac OS X, iOS, and web backend targets for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote from the same Xcode projects.

Cupertino, California, Us

• Provided technical direction and oversight for the Apple TV UI software team. Primary contact for the UI software stack on the Mac OS X-based first generation, the initial bring-up of the iOS- based second generation, and several interim prototype versions of the Apple TV hardware.• Authored the UI rendering engine, base UI toolkit, media playback interface, television handler, photo screen saver, and many animated graphical effects. Found and fixed numerous bugs throughout the entire OS stack. • Led a cross-functional performance effort to reduce memory footprint and CPU utilization to make high definition movie playback on first generation AppleTV possible.

Cupertino, California, Us

• Created a fullscreen media center application as a side project that became the basis for Front Row. Took the concept from prototype to shipping product in less than six months.• Collaborated with UI designers and hardware teams to quickly iterate on the design. Implemented most of the application code from top to bottom. Responsible for demonstrating the application to the CEO and other executives.• Worked with the hardware, Mac OS X, and iTunes teams to optimize and re-work parts of Front Row for new hardware and software features. The resultant application and frameworks became the foundation for the Apple TV user interface.

Cupertino, California, Us

• Designed and developed a modern, high-performance, easy-to-use Unicode text layout API as a side project. This work became the CoreText framework, which was released to the public in Mac OS X 10.5 and is currently at the heart of all Unicode text layout in Mac OS X and iOS.• Worked closely with several internal clients to drive initial adoption and improve the usefulness and usability of the API.

Cupertino, California, Us

• Fixed hundreds of bugs throughout the internationalization, text layout, and text encoding software stacks in Mac OS 9, CarbonLib, and Mac OS X. Worked on the team responsible for porting these pieces to Intel processors.• Made valuable contributions to the early Mac OS X performance efforts by profiling, redesigning, and rewriting key pieces of the ATSUI Unicode text layout API.• Gave presentations on ATSUI and Unicode at WWDC 2002 and 2004.

Carrollton, Tx, Us

• Gained experience with telecom equipment, real-time operating systems, ISO quality standards, and redundant hardware and software.• Received the highest possible rating of "exceeded expectations" at the end of the internship.

Us

• Worked as a member of a support team in a production environment diagnosing operating system, application, hardware and network problems on Windows and Macintosh systems.• Put together standard Macintosh system load sets, scripts, and simple applications that were used throughout the entire organization.