Paul O'Rorke

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/paulororke

Summary
Architect, designer, and developer of software prototypes, products and services.

Passionate about using data mining, machine learning, and analytics to build software that helps people.
Leader with experience getting things done in Silicon Valley start-ups and in a global Fortune 100 company.
Innovator and researcher who enjoys creating ideas and driving them into widely used systems.

LANGUAGES: Java, R, UML, SQL, Prolog, LISP, Mathematica, Python...

Frameworks, IDEs, Platforms, SDKs, Standards & Tools: ANTLR, Eclipse, Hadoop, Hibernate, JMeter,  JProbe, JTest, Lift, LoadRunner, Mahout, MapReduce, Mylin, Perforce, RESTful Web Services, SaaS, Subversion, Trac...

Experience

Chief AI Architect, Sony Mobile Communications, originally Sony Ericsson, Redwood City, CA, 2010-2012

• Developed and drove ideas from inception thru to operations serving millions of customers:
  • created and developed mobile applications focused around data mining, machine learning and natural language processing
  • led development of a cloud-based personalized recommender integrated with the "Facebook Inside" social networking effort
  • led natural language processing efforts focused on applications like prioritizing natural language text
• Started and led Data Science team:
  • championed data science concepts and brought them into the company overcoming obstacles and resistance
  • successfully recruited outstanding creative, innovative developers
  • managed developers and worked with colleagues in Sweden, Japan, Serbia, and Brazil
• Created and championed innovative ideas:
  • created a new innovation and technology center in Silicon Valley for the CTO taking a leadership role in collaboration with two start-up veterans
  • proposed ideas and projects and made presentations to top management including the CEO, CTO, and colleagues world-wide
  • evaluated research efforts at top universities and created a relationship with the most relevant lab at Stanford

Architect, Sr. Software Engineer & Owner,  Samsara Software, Inc. Cupertino, CA, 1997-2010.   Clients were seed stage startups and startups funded by top-tier venture capital firms including Accel, Benchmark, and KPCB. Descriptions of services provided for selected clients follow:

• IronPlanet, Palo Alto, San Jose & Pleasanton, CA.  Extended and improved performance and reliability of a custom online marketplace for heavy equipment.  Led development of a new catalog sales classified listings service.  Diagnosed concurrency and EJB and transaction issues, and re-engineered the event services and entity & stateless session EJBs.  Led load and performance testing and upgrade to a multi-tier cluster.
• Wanadu Interactive, acquired by Cisco Systems, Inc., Mountain View, CA.  Architected and designed a Flash and Java-based lesson presentation, editing and storage system and mentored programmers.
• Sparks.com, acquired by Flax Art & Design, San Francisco, CA.  Advised the CTO on choice of application server. Helped redesign and reconstruct an online store, moving it from an inadequate e-commerce package to a more flexible, scalable architecture. Did UML architecture and design, mentored and trained developers, and developed EJBs and servlets.  Developed a design separating business logic and objects from presentation using open source XML/XSL technology making Sparks the earliest commercial site on Apache Cocoon.  Diagnosed and fixed caching, performance, and concurrency issues.
• Deploy Solutions, originally TTC, acquired by Kronos, Mountain View, CA.  Implemented a database-independent object relational mapping & persistence engine for the original HR system. Deploy's and Kronos' customers included Borders, Circuit City, Fedex, Home Depot, Prudential and Wal-Mart.

Visiting Scholar, Computational Learning Laboratory, & Sr. Research Scientist, Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2007-2008. Contributed to successful completion of go/no-go tests winning the final year of funding of a multi-million dollar DARPA project. Built key parts of intelligent agents capable of "transfer learning" and helped to demonstrate performance improvements in experiments. Introduced modern software practices and tools for collaboration, project management and test-driven development.

Senior Software Architect,  Echopass Corporation, San Francisco & Pleasanton, CA, 2004-2006.  Contributed to the design and construction of a new generation of Echopass's software platform providing advanced call and contact center solutions as a service.  Used a POJO-based approach in rebuilding Echopass applications including Telecenter, an Echopass product that integrates Customer Relationship Management services provided by partners such as Salesforce with Echopass's softphone and with Call & Contact Center software provided by Genesys.

Architect & Research Scientist, Symphoniq Corporation, acquired by Coradiant, then BMC, Palo Alto, CA, 2003-2004.  Designed and implemented JDBC & JSP monitoring modules for Symphoniq's initial planned application management and monitoring product.  Performed memory & timer profiling and optimization & performance testing taking total monitoring overhead to under five percent.

Co-Founder & CTO, DreamLot, Palo Alto & Mountain View, CA, 1999-2000.  Built the technical side of the company, an automotive e-commerce startup cofounded with Michael Yang, a founder of MySimon, acquired by CNet, now part of CBS. Staffed Engineering, Information Technology, and Web Design & Production.  Selected and worked with an IP law firm to secure intellectual property.  Chose and purchased the technology platforms.  Evaluated and selected vendors including Mark Andreesen's LoudCloud, a provider of an early form of cloud computing.  Worked with business and marketing and with focus groups to develop requirements and scenarios.  Architected an object-oriented UML design.  Led development of the application.  Constructed an in-house development environment and worked with LoudCloud to build a highly scalable and redundant hardware and software platform.  Drove the initial release through internal testing and supervised external multi-browser and multi-platform testing.  Conducted load testing and ensured that the application was threadsafe and robust under high loads.

Software Engineer & Technical Leader,  True Genesis, Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1998.  Initiated a data mining practice: developed a methodology, evaluated commercial software, initiated partnership and training efforts with IBM and presented a data mining proposal at Safeway headquarters. Helped build a prototype online grocery store.

Visiting Lecturer,  School of Applied Statistics, National Institute of Development Administration, Bangkok, Thailand, 1997.  Taught an intensive multi-day seminar on Data Mining.

Consulting Research Computer Scientist, Institute for Decision Systems Research, Los Altos, CA, 1995–1996.  Conducted research on diagnostic decision-support and Bayesian Networks with the Director and Stanford Medical Informatics grad students.  Developed decision models. Analyzed experimental results.

Research Computer Scientist, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Pensacola, FL, 1995–1997. Conducted research on decision-support, qualitative decision analysis, and on knowledge acquisition.

Education  
Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign