I am the happiest when designing and writing software that is clean, robust, and useful. For the past six years I have been fortunate to do just that as a lead architect of Proximity, a powerful open-source tool for describing, exploring, manipulating, and modeling the interconnections of people, places, things, and events.

Proximity has a high-performance engine for storing very large datasets of tens of millions of nodes and links, a visual query language for running complex searches in a natural way, and a set of powerful machine learning modules that automatically build human-readable explanations of how the nodes interact and influence each other. Proximity has, among other things, modeled the Hollywood world (at the Comcast Interactive Media Labs), studied how to prevent securities fraud (by analysts at the NASD), helped analysts in the intelligence community, modeled protein interactions in cells, described the behaviour of P2P networks, predicted the success of NFL coaches, and improved anonymization techniques in social networks.

I am always looking for new opportunities to build innovative software. In the past these have included database-driven websites for clients such as McGraw-Hill, educational software to teach math to young children, a search engine with collaborative filtering techniques, robot manipulation software for cognitive-science experiments, and an award-winning system for cell detection in microscopic images.