INTRODUCTION---------------------------------1
BIOGRAPHY & IMAGES---------------------------2
RESUME---------------------------------------3
PUBLICATIONS & AFFILIATIONS------------------4
MISCELLANY-----------------------------------5
INTRODUCTION
| STATEMENT: "I'm a manager and engineer working for the Amazon Android Appstore where my main responsibility is the development and operations of services in support of the Kindle Fire and Android mobile devices." |  |
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BIOGRAPHY & IMAGES
Brian Helfrich has more than 15 years of experience in computer technology research and development. He currently serves as Software Development Manager at the Amazon Android Appstore where he manages the development and operations of services in support of the Kindle Fire and Android mobile devices. Prior to the Appstore, he managed the development of Amazon's EC2 Spot Instances, an auction system for selling cloud computing resources. Before landing at Amazon, he served in multiple technology leadership roles in high-tech startup and R&D companies in a variety of industries including social media, information retrieval, computational nanotechnology, speech recognition, and marketing. Brian started his career at Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore Labs) where he was a Research Scientist working on automated speech recognition applications, visualization of complex systems, and new business development. Brian holds a BA degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. While earning his degree, he worked as a programmer for a handful of Internet and technology start-ups.
HI-RESOLUTION COLOR PHOTO . . . . . . BrianHelfrichPortrait.tif.gz [4.9 Mb]
WEB-RESOLUTION COLOR PHOTO. . . . . . bhelfrich.jpg
RESUME
BRIAN HELFRICH
Seattle, WA
helfrich nine thousand at gmail dot com
SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS
- Creative systems architect and software development manager drawing from
various professional and personal experiences to devise scalable and efficient
solutions for difficult and complex problems, and then execute leading a group
of developers.
- Highly proficient in systems architecture and integration, object-oriented
programming, distributed computing development, and scientific computing and
visualization.
- Over 15 years of experience serving multiple roles in high-tech startup and
R&D companies in various industries including cloud computing, social media,
information retrieval, computational nanotechnology, speech recognition,
marketing, and now mobile.
EDUCATION
- BA, Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley (1999)
COMPUTER SKILLS
- Languages: Ruby, Python, Java, C/C++, Erlang, shell scripting, SQL
- Systems: Solr/Sphinx, Ruby on Rails, Cascading+Hadoop, Amazon Web Services,
Cassandra/Redis, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Mac/Linux/Windows
EXPERIENCE
Software Development Manager - AMAZON, Seattle, WA (4/12 - present)
- Responsible for the architecture, development, and operations of
- Amazon Android Appstore (1/13 - present)
- Amazon Web Service's EC2 Spot Instances (4/12 - 1/13)
Software Development Engineer - AMAZON, Seattle, WA (11/10 - 4/12)
- Architecture and development of Amazon Web Service's EC2 Reserved and Spot
Instances products
Senior Engineer - KNOWMORE, New York, NY (1/10 - 9/10)
- Designed and implemented a Sphinx-based search engine which indexes status
messages and share contents of user streams
- Updated with global rank velocities and user engagement to enable sorting
search results by popularity
- Created a prototype document topic extraction system blending results from
TF*IDF, NER, NP-chunking, and OpenCalais
- Created a distributed task scheduler designed for social network tasks such as
fetching user streams and inbox messages at API rate limits
- Integrated and formalized the company's automated deployment and monitoring
system for computer instances and software
- A combination of EC2 control scripts, Chef, Nagios, and Ganglia packages
Senior Engineer - BOLIVEN (acquired by CAMBRIDGE IP), New York, NY (7/08 - 1/10)
- Designed and implemented an agent-based distributed computing system used to
process and store over 100 million documents producing over 400 million objects
(text files, images, and PDFs) consuming 100 terabytes of storage.
- The system continually ingests raw data from various sources ranging from
tapes sent from the US patent office to live press release data pushed to
collection points.
- The system's agents are fully scriptable and operate in an environment
providing text processing, graphics, OCR, named entity recognition, and
natural language processing services.
- The system runs on Amazon Web Services with load-sensitive dynamic resource
provisioning for efficient utilization of pay-per-hour compute instances.
- Created "Boliven Web Services" comprising
- A set of web services providing RESTful API access to Boliven's data for use
internally, and externally on a pay-per-call basis.
- A set of widgets (patent search/PDF boxes, patent drawings scrollboxes,
scrolling data feeds) and RSS feeds used to syndicate Boliven's data and
functionality to external sites.
- Coordinated the design and execution of a system to pre-calculate the social
network of people implied by their appearances on over 100 million documents.
Senior Architect and Programmer - NANOREX, Bloomfield Hills, MI (6/06 - 6/08)
- Created and managed a project to find failure modes for 25 published carbon-
dimer mechanosynthesis tooltips. Implemented a ~10,000 node, globally dis-
tributed computing network to run the project (nanohive-1.org/atHome) and used
GROMACS to generate tooltip conformations for quantum chemical minimization
via MPQC.
- The goal of the project was to find failure modes for 25 published C2 dimer
tooltips.
- The approach was to perform a molecular dynamics simulation of each molecule
at a very high temperature so that it deformed and undulated significantly,
then to perform quantum chemical geometry optimizations on each deformed
variant produced in the simulation. This approach mechanized the creation of
initial, unstable structure variants that could then minimize to alternative
structures.
- Designed and implemented an HDF5-based simulation results library and int-
egrated it within GROMACS as a new format for writing simulation results data
such as trajectories and energies.
- Prototyped the integration of GROMACS with NanoEngineer-1 (a molecular chem-
istry CAD tool) for atomistic and reduced model molecular dynamics and energy
minimization of DNA.
- Lead the design and development of NanoVision-1, a cross-platform, Qt-based
application that displays chemical structures and simulations especially those
produced by NanoEngineer-1 and GROMACS.
Chief Architect - NANO-HIVE (acquired by NANOREX), New York, NY (6/01 - 6/06)
- Designed and implemented a modular, cross-platform, simulation framework for
molecular modeling. The architecture supports plugins for simulator control,
data import/export/storage, multiscale time/space traversal, distributed
computing, physical interactions, and simulation results.
- Created plugins for
- Simulator control via Java, TCP sockets, and Python.
- In-lab distributed computing (DC) via sockets and @Home-style DC via the
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).
- Integration of Reactive Empirical Bond Order (REBO) molecular dynamics, and
ab initio methods such as Hartree-Fock, Kohn-Sham DFT, and Møller-Plesset
perturbation theory.
- Simulation results via netCDF data files and POV-Ray scene descriptions.
- Created NanoHive@Home, a distributed computing system used for large-scale
nanotech systems simulation and analysis that draws its computing power from
otherwise idle computers sitting in people's homes.
Consultant - OPRISK ADVISORY, Stamford, CT (10/04 - 6/06)
- Research and development of OpRisk's operational risk severity model and
fitting algorithm: supporting algorithm library research, integration and
refinement of prototype code, graphical search space visualization, model
testing and validation, and code performance and stability improvement.
Senior Software Engineer - TELELOGUE (acquired by NUANCE), Iselin, NJ (6/01 - 7/02)
- Designed and led the implementation of a fully distributed computing environ-
ment (DCE) for use in pre-processing the national telephone directory for use
in a speech-enabled directory assistance application.
- DCE features include sophisticated job specification, fail over and retry
mechanisms, graphical control and monitoring interface with login-controlled
access levels, SNMP messaging, and an extensible framework.
- Managed a team of five programmers for the implementation of the DCE.
- Managed the QA department and developed tools and techniques for testing the
performance of a speech-enabled national directory assistance application.
- Co-Inventor of patent #6671670 - System and method for pre-processing infor-
mation used by an automated attendant.
Director of Product Development - ASPEN MARKETING, New York, NY (8/00 - 6/01)
- Met with customers to explain ideas about how web, and related technology
could help them achieve their marketing objectives, then later to discuss
design and implementation details and planning.
- Collaborated internally with sales associates, media production personnel, and
graphic artists.
- Managed a team of (3-5) programmers to deliver web promotions and sites
ranging from referral programs to sophisticated on-line shops complete with
secure product purchase, product search and reviews, affiliate programs,
membership reward point system, gift registry, and configurable communities.
- Maintained a multi-platform network (Solaris, Linux, NT, Mac OS X) running
Apache web servers, Oracle and MySQL databases.
Research Scientist - TELCORDIA (formerly BELLCORE LABS), Morristown, NJ (6/99 - 8/00)
- Spun-out Telelogue, a speech applications startup: prototype/demo development,
product definition, and business plan.
- Re-tooled Telcordia's Intelligent Service Peripheral platform to support
distributed speech-enabled applications.
- Prototyped a graphical monitoring tool for Telcordia's large-scale workflow
management system.
Software Engineer - RUBRIC (acquired by KANA), San Mateo, CA (3/97 - 5/99)
- Created the user-model, user-interface, and user-description to system-call
compiler for creating and deploying Internet-based workflow.
- Wrote an automated seminar/conference management system capable of JavaOne-
sized events.
- Wrote a data-validation and de-duplication system for web-based lead gener-
ation and management.
- Performed a heuristic usability evaluation of the complete system.
- Wrote a low-level system expression evaluator.
Software Engineer - INTEGRATED CONSTRUCTS, Berkeley, CA (9/97 - 9/98)
- Developed prototype of an expert system used to minimize burr formations for
metal part fabrication. (VB, C++, ODBC)
QA/Software Engineer - INTERNET PROFILES, San Francisco, CA (6/95 - 3/97)
- Consulted with Yahoo! website engineers to write custom web log processing
scripts to complete monthly audits of their then million-visit-per-day site.
- Wrote code libraries for processing incoming web log files.
- Rewrite of existing on-site web log transfer utility to use ftp and add more
robust error recovery and retry mechanisms.
- Wrote a graphical ftp and web server uptime utility.
- Devised test plans and test harness for client/server web log analysis
systems.
PUBLICATIONS & AFFILIATIONS
Damian G. Allis, Brian Helfrich, Robert A. Freitas Jr., Ralph C. Merkle,
Analysis of Diamondoid Mechanosynthesis Tooltip Pathologies Generated via a
Distributed Computing Approach, J. Comput. Theor. Nanosci. 8(July 2011)1139-1161.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .[PDF]
Helfrich, B. NanoHive@Home - NanoSystems Simulation. Invited chapter,
Distributed & Grid Computing - Science Made Transparent for Everyone.
Principles, Applications, and Supporting Communities, 2008,
edited by M. Weber, Rechenkraft.net, Marburg.. . . . . . . . . . . . .[PDF]
Member, Nanofactory Collaboration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .[LINK]
Member, International Society for Nanoscale Science, Computation and Engineering
Co-Inventor, United States Patent #6,671,670, System and method for pre-processing
information used by an automated attendant.
Helfrich, B. and J. A. Landay,
QUIP: Quantitative User Interface Profiling. 1999. . . . . . . . . . .[PDF]
MISCELLANY
YouTube Videos
Carbon Nanotube-Fu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .[LINK]
Electrostatic Potential of 5,5 Carbon Nanotube . . . . . . . . . .[LINK]
Mechanosynthesis of Diamond. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .[LINK]
Press Mentions
2006.09.04, GRIDtoday
Nanorex Buys Nano-Hive, Adds Distributed Computing Capability. . .[LINK]
2002.10.11, Small Times
NanoTitan wants to teach
the world to speak nanotech . . . . . . .[LINK]
Former Career
Chef in San Francisco for five years specializing in Caribbean and French
cuisines.