Resume: Marc Ringuette Address: 9027 Generations Dr., Elk Grove, CA 95758 Phone: 916-684-0252(h), 916-479-6477(m) Email: ringuette@solarmirror.com Home page: http://www.solarmirror.com/personal This file: http://www.solarmirror.com/personal/resume.txt Skills: ------ Published researcher in machine learning, information retrieval and filtering. Broadly knowledgeable computer scientist, software designer and programmer. Experienced solar energy researcher and implementor. Availability: ------------ Is available (as of March 2009) for consulting or full-time work in Northern CA. In the past, has found good fits as a senior programmer writing code, as a project team member, and as an academic research scientist. Current projects and interests: ------------------------------ Intelligent search agents, information filtering, search engines, data visualization, social networking technologies. Machine Learning applications: modern statistical and reinforcement learning techniques applied to financial and medical domains, data mining, expert systems. Evaluation of search and retrieval quality. Scientific programming and the hard sciences in general. Computer control of solar trackers; economic simulations; the physics of heat pumps. Employment and business history: ------------------------------- 2008-present Self-employed, Elk Grove, CA Curently pursuing research and entrepreneurship on new mechanisms for collaborative work, knowledge sharing, and social networking. 2007 Solar Mirror, Waynesboro VA Partnered with Earthstar Energy Systems in researching a new solar heat-driven cooling device. Implemented automatic data collection and monitoring for an installed solar thermal testbed, and used it to test heat exchanger designs. 2004-2006 ITA Software, Cambridge MA As a computer scientist and programmer at this high-powered MIT spinoff just getting its phase 2 venture funding, worked to enhance ITA's leading airfare search engine. Co-developed a new web search technique based on structured information extraction (web scraping) using a trainable machine learning approach, based in part on ideas from his earlier work on Yank (1999, below). 2002-2003 EECS, University of California, Berkeley As a staff research programmer, maintained and extended a Java based research tool, DENIM, for sketching the design of a web site using a pen tablet. Managed student projects; participated in grant writing; did a side project that performed map queries over a geographic data set from the Census Bureau. 2000 Speechworks International, London As a consultant working on-site in London, debugged and upgraded the front ends (C++/Unix environment) for the SpeechQuotes voice response demo lines: toll-free numbers which recognized callers' voices in in five languages to provide stock quotes. 1999 Speechworks International, London Working from home as a contract programmer, created a stock quote retrieval back-end (C/Unix environment) for the Speechquotes voice response demo line. 1997-1999 Inference Corporation, Novato, CA. As a full-time Computer Scientist in the research group, designed and coded C++ and Java prototypes of products for intelligent information retrieval, interactive troubleshooting, and data extraction from natural language text. Designed and built a system, Yank, to extract structured problem descriptions from unstructured text documents using an approach of learning by example. 1995 and prior (highlights only): Consulting customers included Cisco Systems and MCC/CYC (Austin). Visiting researcher at SRI (Menlo Park) on robot path planning. Co-wrote a successful neural network backgammon playing program. Sole author of The Report Card, a PC software product that sold more than 30,000 copies over its 10-year life cycle. Academic history: ---------------- 1986-1993 Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh Degree: M.S. in Computer Science Areas: Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Intelligent Agents Note: CMU was and is one of the top 4 CS departments in the world. As a grad student, gained very strong background and breadth in CS. 1982-1986 University of British Columbia, Vancouver Degree: B.S. in Computer Science. GPA: 3.7 Area: Artificial Intelligence GRE's: 99th percentile Graduate research projects: -------------------------- Information filtering and retrieval. Published original research on text categorization using machine learning techniques (see publications). Machine learning. Implemented several types of decision trees for research experiments in text categorization. Implemented the "Theo" frame-based knowledge representation system, featuring explanation-based learning, for thesis advisor Tom Mitchell. Theo was the jumping-off point for more than a dozen research papers by members of Tom's group. Intelligent agents. Did original research into robot agents acting in a simulated and parameterized "Tileworld", both at SRI and CMU. Presented original work on the Utility Based Agent at IJCAI-91 in Sydney, Australia. Programming languages: --------------------- Java, C++, C#, C, Lisp, Prolog, Pascal, Basic. Operating systems: ----------------- Unix (Linux, BSD, Sun), MS Windows XP and Vista. Awards: ------ Second place, Santa Fe Institute's $10,000 Double Auction Tournament (a contest between computerized stock market trading programs), 1990. Fifth place team, ACM Programming Contest, 1990. First place, CMU-CS Programming Contest, 1989. First place in Canada, Euclid Mathematics Contest, 1982. 6,000 participants. Second place in Canada, Junior Mathematics Contest, 1981. 13,000 participants. Publications: ------------ Toward Smarter Databases: a Case Building Toolkit. Research abstract in _Information Visualization in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery_, U. Fayyad, G. Grinstein, and A. Wierse, eds, Morgan Kaufmann, 2002. A Comparison of Two Learning Algorithms for Text Categorization (with David D. Lewis). Proceedings of the Symposium on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval, ISRI, Las Vegas, April 1994, pp 109-118. http://www.solarmirror.com/www_jul01/papers/categ.ps Utility-Based Rational Agents. Proceedings of the IJCAI-91 Workshop on Theoretical and Practical Design of Rational Agents, August 1991. http://www.solarmirror.com/www_jul01/papers/tileworld.ps Introducing the Tileworld: Experimentally Evaluating Agent Architectures (with Martha Pollack). Proceedings of AAAI-90, pp. 571-577. Theo: A framework for self-improving systems (with Tom Mitchell et al.) In _Architectures for Intelligence_, K. VanLehn, ed., Erlbaum, 1991. Outside interests: ----------------- Solar collectors for heating, cooling, and electricity. Particularly, innovative solar concentrators using 2-axis-tracked mirrors; heat-driven cooling using the Vulleumier and duplex Stirling cycles; high-intensity PV coupled with tracking concentrators; practical low-tech solar designs. Sailing. I've sold my old Bristol 30 cruising sailboat but have taken up windsurfing quite actively on a Bic Nova board. General science. I pursue lifelong learning in physics, economics, futurism, philosophy, agriculture, and sustainable technology. [end]