About Me

Who I am and what I do

I am a PhD in Computer Engineering with 20+ years of experience in software design, research & development across industry, academia, startups and consultancy. Projects have targeted distributed systems, ubiquitous computing, mobile middleware, interactive television and mobile/web applications.

I am an innovator (10+ patents), an author (30+ publications) and speaker (50+ talks). I enjoy working in multi-disciplinary teams and with early-stage startups to build pragmatic software solutions for modern mobile and web consumers. My current interests include progressive web apps, conversational UI/UX, machine learning and multi-platform app development with Android, Firebase & Flutter.

I manage Google Developer Group chapters (GDG Hudson Valley & GDG New York City) with a collective reach of over 7000 members in the greater New York area. I organize the DevFest NYC (2-day, multi-track developer focused) and IWD NYC (1-day Women Techmakers) conferences, and diverse 1-day training workshops (PWA Camp, Android Camp, ML Camp etc.). I was also a GDG Northeast Mentor (2015-2017) and helped incubate multiple chapters in the region.

I enjoy public speaking and have spoken on research at IEEE/ACM conferences, and on software development at events like DroidCon, Grace Hopper, MongoDB World, OSCON, DevFest and more.

I believe in education, entrepreneurship and equal representation in tech. I love working with local schools, universities and economic development groups to help advance technology adoption in this region. I've run robotics programs (enrichment, K-8), taught Android (adjunct faculty, SUNY) and co-advised multiple senior design projects (Firebase/Android, SUNY).

My mission is to help translate technology awareness into actionable learning that can lead to personal & professional growth for members of the community. My joy is to spend my free time watching BattleBots with my mayhem-loving 9yo.

PhD Primary Research: Survivable Distributed Systems.

My PhD focused on building middleware to ensure the survivability of distributed Java systems in the face of faults, network partitions or malicious attacks. The middleware provided transparent replication of application objects, using an interceptor strategy coupled with a reliable communications protocol to provide replica consistency, failure detection and automatic recovery with minimal developer involvement.

Related work explored ways to secure group communications protocols (by detecting, and safeguarding against, attacks by colluding nodes) and develop a Secure Auction Service that operated reliably in the face of such malicious behavior.

PhD Secondary Research: Distributed Collaboration Systems.

I also worked on related research in distributed systems and group communications. The Collaboratory Interoperability Framework (Lawrence Berkeley National Labs) provided a unified API across diverse multicast communication protocols, making it easier for scientists to setup and use collaboratories. The MAgNET System (UCSB) explored the viability of distributed agent platforms for reliable and autonomous electronic commerce.