Software Development
Resume:
Joseph
Decker
San Jose, California
******@******.*******.***
Education
B.S. Mathematics,
1984
Experience
Technologies (formerly NCI, formerly Navio Communications)
A primary developer of
Liberate
TV Navigator Standard, an Internet-standards-based platform for delivering
interactive applications, web content, and enhanced television services to
customers of cable operators, etc. With TV Navigator, cable operators write
profitable applications (such as VOD-ordering) primarily in HTML, JavaScript,
Java, etc., which substantially reduces their developments costs and
risks, replacing multiyear development cycles with several-month development
cycles. This product
is now deployed in a few million homes across several different cable systems,
primarily in Europe. TV Navigator product development effort started with
my hiring, grew eventually to a team of a couple dozen, and has been for the
last few years Liberate's largest source of revenue. Worked across all areas
of the client software and several areas of our server software. Worked with
set-top manufacturers, tool providers and customers to make the product work
well for our customers. Managed a group of developers working on multimedia
extensions to the Liberate platform. Led the creation of a stability laboratory,
which improved system MTBF by a factor of over 20 in a handful of weeks.
Initiated and led a revamp of our porting strategy encompassing everything
from relationship management to API work, slicing a third from the cost and
time-to-market of new TV Navigator deployments. Development work primarily
C and C++, bits of Java, also had quite a bit of exposure to HTML and JavaScript,
since our product implements those standards.
1991-1997
Developed neural-network
machine-print OCR software for a research contract for the USPS. Developed
software and a netural network system for English handwriting (print) recognition
that demonstrated half the error rate of competitive products at the time,
while this software wasn't sold due to changes in the handwriting recognition
market in 1996, much of that software was successfully reused in a Chinese
handwriting recognition engine that Synaptics has had some success with.
Developed neural network architecture and embedded software for a custom analog
hardware OCR system to be used in point-of-sale terminal scanning wands, when
hardware changes forced a system redesign, I invented new techniques retarget
almost all the previous work to the newer low-precision digitial solution,
saving months of work over the original redesign plan. Developed
firmware for the Synaptics
Touchpad, now the primary business of Synaptics.. Designed and conducted
human-factors experiments on the usability and performance of pointing devices,
measurably improving product performance and customer acceptance. Developed
the Incomparable, Mysterious, Synaptics Moodpad, a touchpad-related
toy that required little work but ended up driving additional press for Synaptics
and served as the basis for a development kit for Touchpad application developers.
Development work primarily C++, bits of i860 and PIC assembler.
1984-1991
Franklin Electronic
Publishers (formerly Proximity Technologies)
Developed software used
in most of Franklin s handheld products during my tenure. In particular,
I was a lead developer on the Franklin Spelling Ace, Franklin Language Master,
and a line of handheld dictionaries. In total, these products have now over
20M units, and, as of 1999, many of the products were still shipping using
code I developed. Developed numerous specialized techniques for compressing
specific reference works (structured dictionary texts, lists of words with
their conjugation information, small samples of recorded speech) while retaining
the ability to search or otherwise use the compressed data on these small,
embedded handhelds. This significantly reduced product cost in the Language
Master and bilingual product lines. Managed a small group of developers and
language experts in addition to my development duties. Development work primarily
C, bits of various assembly languages.Patents
6,430,305
Identity Verification Methods (Decker)
5,812,698 Handwriting
System and Method (Platt, Nowlan, Matic, Decker)
5,321,609 Electronic
Encyclopedia (Yianilos, Mayer, Decker)
5,229,936 Device
and method for the storage and retrieval of inflection information for
electronic reference products (Decker, Oswalt, Justice)
Publications
Platt, J., Decker, J. E, LeMoncheck, J. E., (1992),
Convolutional Neural Networks for the Combined Segmentation and Recognition of Machine Printed Characters, Proc. 5th Advanced Technology Conference, USPS, 701-713.Addenda
I enjoy hiking and
photography, these led me to start Rock
Slide Photography, a small nature photography business.
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