Computer Science Technical

Resume for Lia Adams

Lia Adams Consulting

PO Box 194

Lia Adams, PhD Palo Alto, CA 94302

Technical Writer 650-***-****

***.*****@*****.***

Objective

I am a technical writer who worked for years in software research and development before

specializing in technical communication. In my technical communication positions, I use my skills

in problem solving, invention, observation, documentation, and instruction.

I am currently engaged through September 2012 but am available after that for contract work.

Experience

My knowledge of computer science and mathematics gives me the vocabulary and experience

needed to observe and interview experts in highly technical subject matter and to analyze the

documentation needs of engineers developing software and hardware. As a writer of developer

documentation, I organize and communicate technical material in documents, hypertext, and

simulations.

In a variety of projects, I have documented software requirements, software designs,

implementation plans, and programming interfaces (APIs). I am an inventor on four successful

patents.

I learn the language, tools, and culture of new groups quickly.

Education

Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics & College Scholar Cornell University

Ph.D. in Computer Science, Stanford University

Becoming a Technical Information Developer at UCSC Extension

Work History

2007 - 2011 Google Inc. Mountain View, CA

As a Senior Technical Writer at Google I planned, wrote, edited, and updated internal technical

documentation.

Procedure: observed, interviewed, and documented internal procedures for the group of

engineers in charge of system reliability of Google Search.

Instruction: Wrote two tutorials and a 100-page user guide for Voldemort, the crucial

internal system for monitoring Google services in the field. (I substitute "Voldemort" for its

real name.) Voldemort is the fundamental tool for system monitoring, but documentation for

it was missing or obsolete before my work.

API and SDK: Documented a new internal library for managing the database of Google

Analytics configuration data. Contents included the database definition, API, and a user

guide.

Analysis: analyzed postmortems for outages of external Google services. Involved

studying notes from retrospectives on service failures, interviewing engineers involved,

and identifying elements common to outages in multiple domains.

2004 - 2006 Expert Support Mountain View, CA

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For Sony Computer Entertainment: wrote, edited, and updated technical documentation.

Documented prerelease versions of the PlayStation Graphics Library (PSGL) API for

game developers targeting the PlayStation3.

Edited assembly language and C++ manuals for Sony's PPU and SPU processors. Made

numerous changes to improve clarity and correctness.

Wrote 29 Starting Guides to help game developers start writing game software for the

PlayStation3.

For Adobe Systems: Wrote, edited, and updated internal and external documentation.

Documented SDKs and APIs for OEMs who develop products based on Acrobat,

PostScript, and PhotoShop.

Did writing and extensive editing on an Adobe mathematical paper describing and

PhotoShop's algorithm for repairing damaged images and how it adapts to properties of

human vision. This algorithm is the basis for the Healing Brush. Working on the

documentation involved interviewing the inventor, and reading the relevant patent.

Did writing and extensive editing on an Adobe whitepaper "Implementation of Black Point

Compensation" explaining PhotoShop's algorithm adapting the level of black in an image

for different devices.

2002 - 2003 Computer Science Department Stanford, CA

Taught CS 143, an introductory course on the principles and practices of compiler construction.

The topics included lexical analysis, theory of parsing, semantic analysis, runtime environments,

code generation, and code improvement (optimization). I wrote and delivered lectures, prepared

handouts, wrote exams, and supervised the students in their programming assignments, which

culminated in a working compiler for a simple object-oriented language. My teaching got rave

reviews from students.

2000 - 2001 Transmeta Corporation Santa Clara, CA

As a Technical Communicator, I contributed to the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) document

for a new processor. Responsibilities included interviewing hardware designers, reading bit

layouts of instruction words to describe in English, and scripting the rebuild process for a multi-

purpose ISA document that could be used to generate both human-readable text and compilable

C code.

1998 - 2000 Lia Adams Consulting Palo Alto, CA

As a Domain Expert at Reasoning Incorporated, I consulted on the functionality and user

interface for a new product. I interviewed internal users, helped formulate the user interface

requirements, and documented the implementation plan, including interfaces to the configuration

management system, the source-code analyzer, and the database schema.

Contract Technical Writer for Expert Support, purveyor of highly technical writers.

Consultant to complete the prototype of Palette Converter tool at FX Palo Alto Laboratory Inc.

Development Strategist at Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology where I helped

originate the Virtual Development Center.

1996 - 1998 Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory Inc. Palo Alto, CA

As a Senior Research Scientist at FXPAL, I co-authored reports and papers, wrote patents,

and gave technical workshops at Fuji Xerox Corporate Research Lab in Japan. As the project

lead for collaboration through virtual spaces, I planned projects, budgeted and allocated

resources, and coordinated project members' activities. I led the team in deploying virtual

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spaces on the web for collaborative work, using infrastructure from Xerox PARC, The Palace,

and PlaceWare.

In adaptive software, I helped create a prototype system for creating programs by manipulating

objects. We investigated physical objects not only as end user interface elements, but also as

tools for actual programming. To investigate opportunities for tangible interfaces, I observed

people giving presentations and analyzed their activities, whereupon our group designed and

prototyped the Palette physical interface.

1990 - 1996 Silicon Graphics Inc. Mountain View, CA

As one of the first Members of Technical Staff on the CaseVision (later ProDev) team, I

contributed to the design, implementation, and release of a successful product: the W orkShop

software development tool suite, which won the Jolt Award for programmer productivity. During

this project, I interviewed customers about the software tools they needed, proposed and

designed features for our programming tools, negotiated with other groups in the company to

enhance their code to support our tools, developed server-side product code in C, C++, and

Ada 95, communicated with engineers on the WorkShop team to ensure smooth internal

integration, wrote internal and external documentation, demonstrated the products to users,

trained customers and marketing staff, and created automated tests for regression detection.

To integrate various tools and languages including Fortran 90 and Ada 95, I walked trees,

augmented symbol tables, created ToolTalk messages, added queries to the code analyzer and

browser, implemented debug-time expression evaluation for C, C++, and Fortran, and defined an

API for definitions and uses of symbols.

1989 - 1990 Sun Microsystems Inc. Mountain View, CA

As a Member of Technical Staff I worked on dby, an advanced client/server debugger,

implementing commands in the process control server and extending a tcl interface to them. For

our compiler front-end engineers, I documented the debugger's API for saving symbol-table

information.

1983 - 1988 Stanford University Stanford, CA

For my Ph.D. research in the Computer Science Department, I designed and prototyped the

Ogre editor for the grid (a rich, language-independent program structuring mechanism). Ogre

allowed programmers interactively to access and modify global structural information within the

context of an individual module, while ensuring that program interconnections stayed consistent

during program editing. Ogre's efficient incremental-update algorithms made interactive grid

access feasible for real programs, without the support of a monolithic environment.

Summer 1983 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Palo Alto, CA

As a research intern on the Voice Project in PARC's Computer Systems Lab, I enhanced the

electronic mail system in the Cedar environment to add voice annotations to messages, using

database operations to coordinate the management of audio resources.

Other experience at work and school

At Four-Phase Systems (now Motorola), I diagnosed and corrected errors in compilers and

run-time libraries when field personnel were unable to find the problem.

At Berol Corporation, I modified and documented the previously comment-free business

applications written in IBM assembly language, and I wrote a 100-page user manual

documenting the order-processing and accounts receivable systems.

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As a Cornell undergrad, I worked as a teaching assistant for classes in programming language

principles, numerical analysis, differential equations, and expository writing.

Publications

Les Nelson, Lia Adams, Satoshi Ichimura, Elin Pedersen: Palette: A Paper Interface for Giving

Presentations, in Proceedings of CHI 99, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 1999.

Lia Adams, Lori Toomey, Elizabeth Churchill: Distributed Research Teams: Meeting Asynchronously in

Virtual Space, in Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, Maui Hawaii,

January 1999.

Lia Adams, Lori Toomey: Designing a Trans-Pacific Virtual Space, in SIGGROUP Bulletin, Volume 19,

Number 3, December 1998.

John Tang, Lori Toomey, Gloria Mark, Lia Adams: Designing Virtual Communities for Work: CSCW '98

Workshop Report, in SIGGROUP Bulletin, Volume 19, Number 3, December 1998.

Lori Toomey, Lia Adams, Elizabeth Churchill: Meetings in a Virtual Space: Creating a Digital Document,

in Proceedings of HICSS, Kohala Hawaii, January 1998.

Internal FXPAL Technical Reports and Technical Memos 1996-1998.

Contributed to documents on SGI Developer Magic: Performance Analyzer User's Guide, ProDev

WorkShop Overview, Static Analyzer User's Guide, CaseVision Environment Guide

Lia Adams, Stanford University Technical Report CSL-TR-89-376 Integrating a Program Structuring

Mechanism with a Program Editor

Patents granted

US Patent 6,509,909 & US Patent 6,195,093 Systems and Methods for Controlling a Presentation

using Physical Objects by Nelson, Adams, Ichimura, Pedersen & Smoliar describe systems enabling

people to control the content and order of a presentation material by manipulating physical

representations of that material. Granted 2003 and 2001.

US Patent 6,175,954 A System and Method for Creating Computer Programs Using Tangible

Interfaces by Nelson & Adams describes a new way to specify and create computations through

manipulating real objects. Granted 2001.

US Patent 6,119,147 A Method and System for Computer-Mediated, Multi-Modal, Asynchronous

Meetings in a Virtual Space by Toomey & Adams is a system for conducting and capturing meetings

among colleagues separated by time and space. Granted 2000.

Tools

In technical writing, I have used:

Operating systems: various flavors of Unix and Windows, as well as some MacOs X.

Markup languages: HTML, XML, Adobe's MML, and a couple of proprietary markup languages.

Desktop publishing: FrameMaker, Word, Acrobat, PowerPoint, Photoshop.

All-around tool for doing everything: emacs!

Doxygen, Javadoc, and other tools for software analysis and documentation in C, C++, and Java.

Version control: ClearCase, Perforce, Subversion, and CVS.

As an engineer, I used:

C, C++, some Python and Java, and assembly languages.

Common Unix scripting languages.

Various tools for software development, static analysis, and debugging

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