Engineer Manager

Omar U. Florez

*** ******* ****

Logan, UT-*****, USA

Name: Omar U. Florez Webpage: http://omar orez.info/

Email: ****.******@***.*** Cellphone: 435-***-****

Education

PhD in Computer Science, (Utah State University, USA),

2007 present

Graduation expected: December 2012

Research Advisor: Curtis Dyreson (******.*******@***.***)

GPA: 3.6

Bachelor in Computer Science, (San Agustin University, Peru),

2001 2007

Placed in top 10 after graduation

GPA: 4.0

Technical Achievements

December 2010 Winner of an IBM Innovation Award on Scalable Data Analytics valued in $20,000 that supports his

PhD thesis on the automatic rules extraction to explain vehicle interactions from tra c cameras

October 2011 Three information disclosures and one patent led from two Summer internships with IBM Research.

Topics: content protection for multimedia data (healthcare and engineering documents)

October 2011 Founder of PrimerosPuestos, a startup that exploits a crowdsourcing algorithm to automatically

discover talented undergrads in Latin America to give them opportunities to get higher education in the

US. (Semi nalist of the Intel Challenge 2011 and Finalist of Wayra-Peru 2011 out of 1200 projects)

October 2011 Published 18 conference papers, journals, and book chapters since undergrad

October 2011 Scholarship to attend to the Society of Hispanics Professional Engineers, Anaheim, CA, USA

August 2011 Scholarship to attend to the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 11), Seattle,

WA, USA

August 2011 Scholarship to attend to the Summer School on Parallel Programming, UC Berkeley, CA, USA

April 2011 Scholarship to attend to the Doctoral Consortium of the 2011 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity

in Computing Conference, San Francisco, CA, USA

February 2011 Scholarship to attend to the NSF Academic Workshop for Underrepresented Assistant & Associate

Professors and Senior Doctoral Students, Los Angeles, CA, USA

November 2005 Best paper in the Fifth South American Congress on Informatics and Systems (COISIS 2005)

December 2000 Second out of over 1500 participants in the undergrad admission exam to the department of Computer

Science at San Agustin University in Peru

Research Interest

Multimedia Information Retrieval: In- Data Mining: Real-time co-occurrence

dexing/similarity search of very large im- analysis of spatio-temporal interactions

ages and videos databases containing real between vehicles for tra c cameras

human activities via Locality Sensitive

Hashing

Machine/Statistical Learning: Classi- Image Processing/Computer Vision:

cation/clustering of words and images Scene understanding via real-time track-

with a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process ing and event detection of moving objects

for tra c road and human activity videos

Large Scalable Systems: Sketching

stream data via Map-Reduce techniques

implemented on hash tables

Work Experience

Research Intern, IBM Almaden Research Center

May 2011

August 2011 Worked in the selective de-identi cation of Medical and Aerospace/Defense documents (PDF les,

images, and videos), which contain sensitive information embedded as text

The goal is to provide automatic sharing of con dential documents between organizations while

preserving intellectual property

Programmed the editing of embedded text with Optical Character Recognition

Programmed the generation of a compact representation for the de-identi ed multimedia document.

This le is then transmitted as a small sequence of bytes over a network

Programmed a hierarchy of access levels. Thus, users with di erent compact les will de-identify

di erent parts of the original document within a safe server Achievements:

Wrote two Information Disclosures based on these algorithms, a requirement to initiate the process

of getting two patents

Implemented a demo to illustrate the automatic translation (from English to Spanish) of medical

terms embedded in Echocardiogram videos

Collaborated with code and demo in the obtaining of a FOAK (First of A Kind) program for the

Content Protection Group at IBM. The FOAK is valued in $800K, involved the collaboration between

IBM Almaden and IBM Tokyo, and last for 2 years. Target clients are Airbus and Raytheon

Contact information: Dulce Ponceleon, Research Manager (*****@*******.***.***).

Research Intern, IBM Almaden Research Center

July 2010

October 2010 Internship at IBM Research in California in the Health Care and Content Protection group

Programmed the Statistical Learning of regions that contain patient s sensitive information em-

bedded as text within Echocardiogram images and videos

Programmed the de-identi cation of this data with k-anonymity Data Mining techniques Achievements:

Wrote two information disclosures needed to initiate the process of getting two patents

The rst patent is about privacy preserving in echocardiogram images/videos

The second patent is about the automatic mixing of diverse multimedia data under fair use copy-

right principle. This patent has recently been led in the US Patent and Trademark O ce

Contact information: Dulce Ponceleon, Research Manager (*****@*******.***.***)

Graduate Research Assistant, Utah State University

August 2007

present Developed, made experiments, and wrote articles on Discovery of Rules to Explain Vehicle Tra c

in Video data, Large Scale Clustering/Similarity Search of Unstructured data (Video, Music, Human

Motion, and Text), Information Retrieval, and Parallel Computing. Achievements:

Twelve publications in refereed conferences, journals, and book chapters

One IBM innovation award valued in $20,000 for our study on the e cient detection of interesting

patterns in congested roads from streams of video data

Four scholarships to attend conferences, doctoral workshops, and Summer schools. My Work:

Very fast retrieval of human motion in video data

Web: www.omar orez.info/index.php?id=very-fast-retrieval-video

Vehicle tra c understanding in video sequences

Web: www.omar orez.info/index.php?id=tra c-understanding

Sublinear search of time series and human motion via hashing

Web: www.omar orez.info/index.php?id=retrieve-human-motions

Extracting timeseries from video data to automatically categorize activities

Web: www.omar orez.info/index.php?id=timeseries-video

HRG: Voronoi-based graph for e cient indexing of multi-dimensional data

Web: www.omar orez.info/systems/hrg/

Demo: omar orez.info/systems/hrg/demo.html

GPS and Cellphone applications: Mobile browsing of USU campus with cellphones

Web: www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1omPC5RtZM

Voice2SQL: Automatic translation of commands from voice to SQL sentences

Web: www.omar orez.info/index.php?id=voice2sql

Contact information: Curtis Dyreson, Academic Advisor (******.*******@***.***)

Software Engineer, zAgile

January 2007

August 2007 Software Engineer in a team with people from di erent countries (Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Chile)

Experimented in person the problems associated to work in a distributed team: di erent cultures, time

zones, geographical positions, and level of knowledge

Integrated opensource tools from a software lifecycle (design, implementation, testing, and documen-

tation) into one general framework See http://www.zagile.com/

Leadership Skills

Founder of PrimerosPuestos.org

December 2010

present This is an startup that gives equal opportunities to undergrad students in Latin America to get

assistantships in American universities, internships, and mentoring.

We developed the TalentScore algorithm to let users of Facebook choose their most talented friends

via Crowdsourcing

10 students with highest TalentScore are introduced to universities and companies every week.

This social e ort is aimed to break the networking barrier that hinders young students to go abroad,

get a higher degree, and come back to play a positive role in Latin American countries. Achievements:

Semi- nalist of the Intel Challenge 2011!, which selects innovative startup projects around the world

Signed a partnership with Fulbright-Peru to nd low-income and talented students in Peru

Signed a partnership with ObjettivoLavoro (an Italian HR company) to let them use our TalentScore

algorithm to recruit talent in their Latin American o ces.

This project is in the annual agenda of the ACM Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institu-

tions (CAHSI)

Vice-president in the USU chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

January 2010

April 2011 Achievements:

Organized several programming contests for undergrad students at USU (8 students were chosen to

attent the regional/national contests and received travel funds from USU-ACM in 2010)

Participated in visits to the Adams Elementary School in Logan, Utah to introduce children to

some important Computing concepts such as safe Internet browsing, robot programming, and game

development

Research Experience

A list of most relevant/recent publications is shown below. For a complete list, please visit

www.omar orez.info/index.php?id=publications.

CONFERENCE

PROCEEDINGS

Omar U. Florez and Curtis Dyreson, Discovering Activity Interactions in a Single Pass over a

March 2012

Video Stream, ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (ACM SAC 2012), Trento, Italy.

Omar U. Florez, Similar Events do not Last the Same in Aerospace and Engineering Processes,

October 2011

so Neither their Rules!, NASA Conference on Intelligent Data Understanding (CIDU 2011),

Mountain View, California.

Omar U. Florez and Curtis Dyreson, Scalable Similarity Search of Timeseries with Variable

October 2011

Dimesionality, 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2011),

Scotland, UK.

Curtis Dyreson and Omar U. Florez, Building a Display of Missing Information in a Data

October 2011

Sieve, ACM 14th International Workshop On Data Warehousing and OLAP (DOLAP 2011) at

CIKM 2011, Scotland, UK.

Omar U. Florez and Curtis Dyreson, Mining Rules to Explain Activities in Videos, 19th ACM

October 2010

Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2010), Toronto, Canada.

Acceptance rate: 17.9%

Curtis Dyreson and Omar U. Florez, Data Aspects in a Relational Database, 19th ACM

October 2010

Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2010), Toronto, Canada.

Acceptance rate: 17.9%

Omar U. Florez and Curtis Dyreson, Sublinear Similarity Search of Realistic Timeseries and

March 2010

its Application to Human Motion, 11th ACM SIGMM International Conference on Multimedia

Information Retrieval (MIR 2010), Pennsylvania, USA.

Acceptance rate: 16%

Omar U. Florez, Xiaojun Qi, and Alexander Ocsa, MOBHRG: Fast K-Nearest Neighbor

April 2009

Search by Overlap Reduction of Hyperspherical Regions, 34th International ACM Conference on

Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2009), Taipei, Taiwan.

Acceptance rate: 25%

Omar U. Florez and SeungJin Lim, Discovery of Interpretable Time Series in Video Data

March 2009

Through Distribution of Spatiotemporal Gradients, 24th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied

Computing (ACM SAC 2009), Hawaii, USA.

Acceptance rate: 32%

Omar U. Florez and SeungJin Lim, HRG: A Graph Structure for Fast Similarity Search in

September 2008

Metric Spaces, 19th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications

(DEXA 08), Turin, Italy.

Acceptance rate: 36%

JOURNALS

Omar U. Florez and SeungJin Lim, A Spoken Natural Language-Based Interface for Querying

November 2008

SQL Databases, In International Journal of Information Technology and Intelligent Computing

BOOK

CHAPTERS

Omar U. Florez and SeungJin Lim, Modeling Query Events in Spoken Natural Language

for Human-Database Interaction, In Human Computer Interaction: New Developments, ISBN

978-3-902613-38-7. InTech Education and Publishing. Vienna, Austria.

Teaching Experience

Teacher Assistant for Advanced Databases (CS 6800), With Dr. Curtis Dyreson at USU.

Spring term - 2010

Teacher Assistant for Database Systems (CS 5800), With Dr. Curtis Dyreson at USU.

Fall term - 2009

Teacher Assistant for Grad Seminar (CS 7900), With Dr. SeungJin Lim at USU.

Spring term - 2008

Invited Talks

Content Protection for Medical Videos and Background, IBM Almaden Research Center,

June 2011

San Jose, CA, USA.

Concurrent Analysis of Tra c in Streaming Video Data, Doctoral Consortium in the Richard

April 2011

Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, San Francisco, CA, USA.

Advanced Similarity Search of Realistic Timeseries, Computer Science department, Univer-

February 2011

sity of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA.

Understanding Tra c in Video Data, 4th Symposium of Computer Graphics and Image

December 2010

Processing (SCGI-2010), San Pablo Catholic University, Arequipa, Peru

Computer Skills (experience in parenthesis)

Programming JavaSE (good), C/C++ (good), Professional Microsoft Certi ed Systems Administra-

JavaME (familiar), Matlab (good), C Certi cation tor (familiar), Microsoft Certi ed Sys-

MPI (for parallel computing) (familiar), tems Engineer (familiar)

R (familiar), C# (familiar)

Technical writing LTEX(good)

A OS Windows (good), Linux (good)

Professional References

Dr. Dulce Ponceleon: Research Manager, IBM Research (*****@*******.***.***)

Dr. Curtis Dyreson: Academic Advisor, Utah State University (******.*******@***.***)

Dr. Mike Hinchey: Director of Lero-the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre and Professor of

Software Engineering at University of Limerick, Ireland (****.*******@****.**)

Dr. Ernesto Cuadros: President of the Peruvian Computing Society (********@***.***.**)

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