Summary

Widely knowledgeable multi-disciplined computer scientist. An engineer who can combine technical expertise with commitment to the customer. Able to see problems from all angles and design thorough and well-considered solutions. An insightful mentor who sees and cultivates the potential in others.

Select Accomplishments

• Pioneered Software Usability Engineering. Defined initial group strategy. Built instrumented, fast prototyping systems. Conducted research and data analysis. Led software product development implementing principles revealed in prior research. Coauthored corporate User Interface Architecture and Design.
• Specified the preliminary protocol, system architecture and database schema redesigns when company was acquired to re-engineer a distributed system in support of shipping Consumer Electronics products. Subsequently designed and wrote major server subsystems.
• Led software engineering team in the successful development of a co-branded multi-corporation, multi-platform, multi-protocol network operating system.
• Built and led a team of software, database, operations, and broadcast engineers and technicians to deploy, run and troubleshoot a network of roughly 800 distributed servers serving more than 10 million consumer electronic devices in over 250 distinct market areas in the US and Canada.

Professional Experience

Research & Development

• Designed the now standard inverted-T arrow key arrangement, based on analysis of keyboard usage data.
• Defined the DECwindows User Interface Architecture, a precursor of Motif.
• Designed and built instrumented, rapidly modifiable, test-bed applications for human factors testing of text editors, e-mail systems and command languages.
• Developed innovative user interface design- and test-software that used a hidden experimenter to explore user behavior resulting in the development of a command language that exhibited a ten-fold reduction in UI errors.

Software Development

• Supervised, redesigned, tested and shipped a tactical communications (text, VoIP, video, and file transfer) SOA-based application targeted at disaster first responders.
• Led the Digital Equip. engineering team in the Apple/DEC alliance, developing PATHWORKS for Mac, which included components from five companies headed by DEC and Apple, to connect Macs and VAXes over AppleTalk, DECnet and TCP/IP.
• Initiated the redesign of transmitted protocols, basic server system architecture and database schema of GuidePlus+, a reimplementation of Gemstar’s shipping TVGuidePlus+ product. Then designed and implemented Sybase and C++ based server subsystems for loading, storing & transmitting TV station, cable & lineup data.
• Designed and implemented a cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Unix) multi-protocol distributed meeting server & strict ANSI C object-oriented framework it was built with.
• Developed an X Window text editor, the largest end user application to ship with DECwindows V1. Predicted to the week the amount of work involved in converting a modal terminal application to a non-modal direct manipulation design.

Operations

• Managed a team that deployed and maintained a network of about 800 datacasting hosts, transmitting information over analog and digital TV signals, with inserters in TV stations and cable headends in the US & Canada, serving c. 10,000,000 user devices.
• Led a team that provided third-tier technical support for embedded interactive program guides and the broadcast infrastructure that drives them, as well as tools used by technical support and broadcast operations.
• Administered timesharing systems used by Central Engineering, Manufacturing and the Corporate Data Center for Digital Equipment Corporation.
• Developed and deployed backup, e-mail, dynamic priority scheduling, performance monitoring and file transfer applications used in the running of RSTS time sharing systems supporting RSTS, RT-11, language and DECnet development, often in advance of the development of the official products.

Employment

Eldacur Technologies

Clients include: F4W, Inc.; Secure Network Systems, LLC; Stellar Switches, Inc.

TV Guide On Screen, Inc. / VideoGuide Inc.

World Benders, Inc.

Digital Equipment Corporation

Education

Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio

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http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimburrows