GEORGE AROUSH

39 Hobbs Road, Waltham, MA 02452

(781) 893-7508                george@aroush.net

 

 

SUMMARY:

 

With over eleven years extensive professional experience in software development and leadership ability with hands-on experience in Software, Application, and System Architecture Design & Development, Object Oriented Programming, Design & Analysis, Component, Framework & Toolkit Development, Web, Internet, Networking & Communication, Search Engine and Data Mining.  With a background in teaching, over the years I have developed unique abilities to communicate and translate complex technical problems into simple English as will as translate complex business problems into technological solutions.

 

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

 

Languages:           C++, C, C#, Java, JavaScript, ASP, VBScript, PHP, and Visual Basic.

Design:                  Design Patterns, UML, OOA, OOD and OOP.

Protocols:             XML (SOAP, XSL, XSLT, UDDI, WSDL, etc.), HTTP, NNTP, FTP, CGI, HTML, SGML, LDAP, TCP/IP, UDP, and IPX.

Tools:                     Microsoft, Sun, Borland, Apache, Eclipse, WebGain, OpenWatcom, GNU, CygWin, Sun C, SCO C, SPARCompiler C/C++, StarTeam, SourceSafe, CVS, Microsoft Windows SDK, XVT, StarView, etc.

O.S.:                       Windows, Linux, Solaris, MAC, AIX and SCO.

Programming: Client/server programming, multi-threaded & concurrency programming, cross-platform programming, and internationalization.

Technology:          STL, .NET Framework SDK, J2SE, JDK, Web Services (Java and .NET), Apache tools (Apache, Jakarta, XML, etc.,) Windows SDK, Win32, MFC, COM, DCOM, ISAPI, NSAPI, Qt, MySQL, MS Access, Microsoft/Oracle SQL, R/DBMS, Internet, and Search Engine.

 

WORK HISTORY:

 

        May 2003 –                        Digital Self Corporation, Cambridge, MA

Dec. 2003       Digital Self is the leader in creating Knowledge Management software that focuses on expertise location, team creation and expertise audit facilities.

                                Principal Software Engineer/Architect

As a Principal Software Engineer and Architect for a startup company that provides Expertise Location solutions, I was responsible to oversee the company’s flagship product ExpertSeek.

·         Re-factored ExpertSeekService to enable multi-site searching and scalability.  Each site is based on ExpertSeekService server built using VS.NET utilizing web services.

·         Designed and specked the technical and functional requirement for a P2P Expertise Location system.

·         Addressed performances and bug issues in ExpertSeek.  Improved incremental update performances by a factor of 60% and searching by a factor of 35%.

Environment: C++, C#, .NET, Visual Studio .NET, Win32, Windows SDK, MS SQL, MS Visio, UML, SOAP, XML, multi-threaded, distributed computing/search, Web Services, SourceSafe, CygWin and Windows 2000/XP.

 

        Dec. 2001 –                        LightSpeed Software, Inc. (formerly: TopicalNet, Inc.; now Astoria Software, Inc.), Woburn, MA

Apr. 2003       LightSpeed Software develops and markets technology solutions that enable businesses to better control, manage, disseminate, and utilize their electronic assets.

Senior Software Engineer/System Architect

As a Senior Software Engineer and System Architect reporting to the VP of Development, I have multiple responsibilities across LightSpeed’s flagship product: Knowledge Appliance (for content management), Classifier Engine (for document classification), and ReadyPortal (for portal management) – a suit of KMS products utilizing a patented Classification technology.

·         Co-Architecture and implemented LightSpeed’s Search Services; a distributed and scaleable full text search and indexing engine with features such as mirror-distribution, even-distribution, growth-distribution, archive-distribution, searching across indexes, within an index, and within sub-index.  The engine’s search, index and administration facility interface are based on Web Services using SOAP technology.  The system is designed around the Java technology by utilizing RMI, JINI, and JMS, and uses Lucene (an open-source Java-based search engine) for indexing and searching.  The project will translate to a saving of $250,000 a year for the company and eliminate royalty fees per sale of the Astoria line of products by removing a dependency on Verity’s search engine.

·         Worked with the Portal team to enable searching and content management capability in LightSpeed’s ReadyPortal product; integrated with Lucene for searching and with LightSpeed’s Knowledge Appliance for content management.

·         Designed and implemented the ClassifierAdmin application; a GUI intensive client/server application written in C++ using “Qt” (from Troll Technology) for cross platform UI support (Windows and Linux).  The application allows users to create topic-maps manually or automatically, import an existing user-based-taxonomy into the system and map it into LightSpeed’s base-taxonomy, edit existing taxonomies, administer the Classifier server, and manage background tasks for classification.

·         Designed and implemented a client/server interface for the Classifier engine using XML-RPC.

Environment: C++, Java, XML, Apache tools (Ant, Axis, Log4J, Lucene, SOAP, Tomcat, Xalan, Xerces, XML-RPC), Web Services, Win32, Windows SDK, multi-threaded, POSIX, PHP, JSP, Eclipse, Visual C++, gcc, CVS, WinCVS, CygWin, Qt, MySQL, Microsoft Visio, Windows 2000/XP and RedHat Linux.

 

        Nov. 2000 –                        Unveil Technologies, Inc., Waltham, MA

        Aug. 2001                        Unveil is a leading provider of NLP solutions for the CRM market.

Principal Software Engineer/Architect

Software engineer and architect for a startup company providing NLP solutions for the CRM market; was responsible for many aspects of the technology and business development.

·         Designed and implemented the company’s NLP engine for the proprietary Natural Language Processing technology - a patented technology.  Highly optimized the engine to perform nearly 2000 queries a second.  Developed a SDK that provides an easy integration for third party application with the NLP engine.

·         Designed and implemented a Web-based client/server “Conversation Manager” application to be used as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the company’s CRM initiative to clients and VCs.  The server communicated with the company’s NLP engine and the Speech Processing engine.  Based on the source of the incoming query, the server construct a response by generating DHTML or VXML output using XSLT.

·         Designed and implemented “The Wizard" application to be used by linguistic engineers to create and manage NLP “Knowledge Database”.  Used Swing for version 1.0; used MFC for version 2.0.

Environment: C++, Java, DHTML, SOAP, XSLT, XML, Win32, Windows SDK, MFC, RogueWave, multi-threaded, Visual C++, VisualCafe, JBuilder, SourceSafe, CygWin, Windows 2000 and RedHat Linux.

 

        July 1997 –                        Dataware Technologies, Inc. (acquired by: OpenText) Cambridge, MA

        Nov. 2000                        Dataware is a leading provider of e-business solutions to Global 2000 companies worldwide.

Principal Software Engineer and Solution Architect (July 00 - Nov. 00)

·         Architecture, reviewed, and over-sighted of clients’ solutions before and during development.

·         Participated with sales personals (as needed) during clients’ engagements.

·         Worked with the CTO office to provide technical direction, leadership, and expertise, company wide.

·         Provided leadership, training and mentoring expertise company-wide; wrote reports and white papers.  Provided training and presentations on: C++, STL, UML, OO, Design Pattern, XML and Web-Services.

Project/Team Leader (Sep. 98 - July 00)

·         Leaded a team of up to five developers to oversee Dataware’s Cartridges development initiative.

·         Re-architecture of the Cartridge component and created a Toolkit and SDK for cartridge development with full development documentation.  Using the Cartridge Toolkit, Dataware and third-party developers wrote new cartridges to integrate external data-sources with KMS.

·         Cut down a Cartridge development time from an average of six month to less than four weeks.

·         Wrote an Internet Toolkit that provides a common and generic interface to access resources on the NET.  Through a common API, applications can access: HTTP, NNTP, IMAP, SMTP, and FTP resources.

·         Took a lead role to architecture Dataware’s flagship product: Knowledge Management Suite version 3.0 (KMS) from design to development and finally to release.

·         Represented Dataware to clients and strategic partners; gave technical talks about Dataware’s cartridge and KMS technology.

Senior Software Engineer (July 97 - Sep. 98)

·         Re-implemented KMS’s Clustering engine.  The new engine is up to 400% faster and 60% smaller and provided the ability to scale based on system load.

·         Integrated KMS’s Web Server Engine with IIS & NES using ISAPI & NSAPI.  Created COM/DCOM wrappers to provide access to third-party components.  Created and provided ASP forms and technical support for the Solution Delivery Team to configure KMS based on clients’ need.

·         Ported Dataware’s Knowledge Query Server (http://www.queryserver.com) from NT to Solaris and Linux platform.

Environment: C++, JavaScript, VBScript, ASP, XML, DOM, multi-threaded, internationalization (UNICODE), native-socket, CGI, S/HTTP, NNTP, FTP, SMTP, LDAP, TCP/IP, Win32, Windows SDK, COM, DCOM, CORBA, ActiveX, ISAPI/NSAPI, MS/Oracle SQL, MS Access, R/DBMS, ODBC, Documentum, Exchange, Lotus Notes, Visual C++, gcc, KAI C++, VisualCafe, JBuilder, StarTeam, PVCS, CygWin, POSIX, Windows NT/2000, Solaris and RedHat Linux.

 

        Oct. 1992 –                        SilverPlatter Information Inc. (acquired by: Ovid), Norwood, MA

        July 1997                        SilverPlatter is a leading provider of electronic information to researchers and librarians worldwide.

Senior Software Engineer/Project Leader

·         Project Leader for the WebSPIRS client/server CGI engine (a WWW version of SilverPlatter’s Retrieval software.)  Made significant contribution to the project’s design and implementation; ported to NT, Solaris, SCO, AIX & Linux platform.  Implemented using OO design using C++; introduced template-driven Web forms (e.g. ColdFusion, ASP, JSP, etc. style forms) over a CGI gateway to provide server-side processing.

·         As a Project Leader, made significant contribution to SilverPlatter’s Search and Retrieval Engine – a client/server based technology.  Designed and implemented key components such as: Boolean matching, index lookup and document hit retrieval and highlighting.  Ported to Windows 16/32-bit, MAC, MS-DOS and UNIX (Linux, SCO, AIX & Solaris).  Implemented support for non-English (European character set) database and was responsible for delivering three major releases to the market.  Implemented using OO design idioms using C.

Environment: C, C++, JavaScript, VBScript, SGML, internationalization (European character set), CGI, Microsoft, Borland, Watcom, Symantec, MetaWorks, CodeWarrior, GNU, Sun C, SCO C, SPARCompiler C/C++, StarTeam, CVS & PVC, Microsoft Windows SDK, XVT, and Windows 3.1, 9x, NT, Macintosh, Solaris AIX, SCO, and Linux.

 

        May 1992 –                        Summit Technology, Waltham, MA

        Oct. 1992                        Contractor: Imbedded System Programming

Implemented the recovery subsystem for LASIK system in which the system would shutdown if a fault of any kind should occur.  The program was coded and tested by means of “burning” the code into an EPROM.

 

TEACHING SKILLS:

 

        Sep. 1989 –                        School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

        Present                        Associate Faculty teaching a computer graphics programming class - C.E., Tufts & SMFA students

Teaching a programming class: “Introduction to Java Programming for Artist.”  Exposing students to Java and Computer Graphics programming.  Assisting students to get hand on experience in Java programming to generate computer graphics images and animation in 2-D and 3-D, using AWT.  (Note: this is a part-time job; two evenings a week; Spring and Fall only.)

 

        Winter 93 –                        Northeastern University (Graduate School), Boston, MA

                                Advanced computer graphics programming class - Graduate/M.S. students

Taught a one semester Advanced Computer Graphics course for the Graduate/M.S. students.  Exposing students to advanced computer graphics such as 3D rendering and ray tracing.

 

EDUCATION:

 

        July 1992                        M.S. in Computer Science; Northeastern University, Boston, MA

Major: Networking and Communication, Operating System and Computer Architecture, and Computer Graphics.

        Nov. 1990                        B.F.A.; Tufts University, Medford, MA

Major: Fine Arts, Computer Arts, and Animation.

 

REFERENCES:

 

References will be furnished upon request.