Ron Burback's Resumé

Ron Burback
1944 Paseo Del Cajon
Pleasanton, CA 94566, USA

Home: (925) 484-3017
Cell: (925) 413-6436
E-mail: burback@cs.stanford.edu
Web: www-db.stanford.edu/~burback

Education

1999

Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Ph.D. degree in Computer Science. Software Engineering of Dynamic Large Distributed Systems: Methodologies, Architectures, and Paradigms. Qualifying exam in artificial intelligence. Major project in mathematical logic. Ph.D. candidacy in applied math and physics. Training in medical informatics.

1982

Stanford University, Stanford, CA. M.S. degree in Engineering. Course work in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.

1974

University of Colorado, Boulder, CO. B.A. degree in Physics and Mathematics. Summa cum laude.

Employment

1/02-Present: Independent Consultant.

Hired as expert in large enterprise health care software systems to help defend Blue Cross in a patent infringement lawsuit. Accomplished Blue Cross employees interviews to establish software architecture and design. Wrote many patent claims construction charts. Became an expert in software patent technology. Review established systems and generated technical reviews. Wrote deposition question plans and attended several depositions of experts in the field. Helped write a 250 page expert report on the industry, patent invalidity and non-infringement construction.

Hired as expert in the field of large enterprise health care software to establish the invalidity of a software patent.

Hired as an expert in large enterprise software systems for air freight. Analyzed systems, conducted interviews, analysis or confidentiality of information, copyright infringement, and proprietary software. Expert report in progress when case was settled out of court.

Hired as an expert in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for manufacturing. Analysis of customer and software solutions.

Presented Software Engineering class at Jiao Tong University in Shang Hai, China. Beginning conversational Chinese.

Co-authored a chapter on current architectures, design, and functionality of Hospital Information Systems with Gio Widerhold to be published in an upcoming Medical Encyclopedia peding copy right issues.

Founder of Stanford Enterprise Informatics Software, Inc. Wrote the business plan. Gave VC presentations. Current focus is in the legal market place to data mine a knowledge base based on the current collection of software patents and then uses this knowledge to establish a market for intellectual property.

Noemasoft web site development. Installed a network including several machines, switches, hubs, DSL, and a firewall. Installed Linux and configure DNS, email, pop, ssh, apache web server, and tomcat java servlet system including a secure server. Installed Oracle and configure. Design and implemented user interface including establishing templates for web pages, navigation, color scheme, and site physics. Designed and implemented objects in java to support user interface, business logic, and database interfaces including table design. Built authentication and authorization system with dynamic web views for customers, support, and management. Built the first application of a calendaring system. Development of a universal calculator language and system tool. Development of container class library including stacks, queues, hash tables, trees, partial order trees, sets, and bags. The goal of this system is to build the electronic patient chart.

Inspired by genetic engineering, developed a biological process that enables fresh-water fish to live in salt-water. This process works on live-bearers. Stable population after several generations. Patent in process.

Design and assembly of multi-media work station including audio, graphics, and video support.

Authored audio recording of Jack Prelutsky.s children poems.

Founder of Healthcare Enterprise Informatics Software, Inc. Wrote executive summary, detailed business plan, financial model, VC presentation, and enterprise architecture for secure electronic health record and a free-market place to buy and sell healthcare services. Established team of senior staff and consultants. Contacted VCs.

Working with Dave O.keefe built a Java-based web crawler to calculate the Motley fool.s index for companies.

6/00-12/01: Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering, EAinvest.com.

Engineering development for a web-based ecommerce company doing Web services for financial planning including portfolio management. Other components include financial tools, account aggregation, dynamic market quotes, brokerage, and financial research. Technology includes authentication, authorization, security, encryption, Oracle, Java, Sun, three-tiered distributed systems, and QA. Established and built engineering team and overall architecture as well as VC funding presentations. Series 7 general securities representative financial exam.

4/99-5/00: Vice President of Engineering, ccRewards.

Engineering development for a web-based person-to-person ecommerce company doing coupons, and purchase tracking. Web services included indexes, news groups, email list, news articles, user identity, authentication, authorization, and search agents. Brought the company from zero to a fully functional engineering organization with a production web site with over 5,000 offers, a million registered users, and about 5 million page views per day. Based on the Apache web server, CGI scripts, PERL, public key certificates, Unix, NFS, JAVA, encryption, distributed workload manager supporting multiple servers running many services. Other duties include engineering development plans, staffing plans, budget plans, job descriptions, operational plans, hardware purchase plans, and business plan with VC presentations.

1/99-3/99: Vice President of Engineering, Omnibot.

Engineering development for a web-based person-to-person ecommerce company. Web services included auction portal and picture hosting.

6/94-6/98: Director of Distributed Computing, Stanford University.

Distributed Computing Environment Project. Architecture, implementation, and technical management of the next generation infrastructure for Stanford. Issues covered include network security, authentication, authorization, encryption, private key, public key, kerberos, electronic commerce, 7-by-24 operations, highly available services, http, html, rpc, ldap, x.500, dns, and load balancing. Services included Email, Web, FTP, Unix, AFS, DFS, DCE, News Groups, and Academic Computing Support. Day to day operations of systems.

3/87-6/94: Independent Consultant.

In this seven year period I have been a consultant, taking short term jobs to support my family while pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford on the part-time basis.

1/90-6/94: Teacher, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

CS157 is a first year graduate level class in logic and deduction in the Computer Science Department. CS157 Lab is a computer laboratory that uses the Tableau theorem prover. CS193U is a class in C, Unix, and software engineering. CS221 is an introduction to artificial intelligence. CS523 is an advanced class in readings in AI. CS001U is a class in Unix. CS193U software engineering. Award for the highest rated class in the school of engineering.

1/88-1/90: Chief Executive Officer. Tableau Deductive Systems, Pleasanton, CA.

Partnership with two Stanford Professors. I built a complete first order logic programming system that uses the Macintosh environment and is sold in coordination with a book from Stanford University. This system is required study at 17 universities throughout the world and is distributed by Addison-Wesley. We have distributed over 6,000 copies of the system since 1990 with no bug reports.

1/92-6/93: Director of Engineering, Chief Scientist, and Architect. Oceania Health Care Systems, Palo Alto, CA.

Architect of a health care information system with application suites in notes, orders, registration, and result reporting around the concept of the Electronic Patient Record. Multi-media, dictation and transcription, sound, images, graphics, Client-Server, transaction processing, relational databases, NeXT machines, Unix, the legal chart, Objective-C, C, SUN servers. Delivered the first application suite of admission, discharge, and transfer to first customer. This system has been live for a year now with no reported errors from the field. Three patents were started based on my work.

5/91-1/92: Senior Corporate Consultant, Independence Technologies, Fremont, CA.

Architecture and implementation of a transaction environment for improved efficiently associated with a health insurance claims processing system. Raising the base line of technology by bring in C++ class libraries, GUI systems, and data flow graphs based on a graphical programming environment used to build a work flow processing system. Proposal writing and initial marketing contacts which lead to the tripling of the size of the company in only six months.

2/91-5/91: Researcher, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

As a researcher, I designed and implemented a form of situational logic, added code and plan synthesis for both predicate logic based programs and temporal plans. This system is used in a high level graduate class at Stanford as well as a planner for mechanical assembly. The system was extended to discover and generate C programs.

7/88-2/91: Senior Corporate Consultant, TDS Health Care Systems, San Jose, CA.

Architecture of a multimedia distributed health care information system. Design of distributed patient record on the relational data model. Architecture of artificial intelligence decision support system for health care information system. Built an augmented transition net parser. Built an image processing system capable of taking a standard report and converting it into more modern display technology. Modernized the database report generator to emit postscript. Built four NEXT applications: a medical calculator, a medical text editor, a nurse spread sheet reporting system, and a neural net based medical diagnosis system.

12/88-6/89: Associate, Teknekron Transportation Systems, Berkeley, CA.

Built an image recognition system that could read bar coded information, hand written information, locate the signature, and distinguish between various forms. This system was used to scan invoices, then have the computer read the information off of the invoice with support for AIM-5 and 3 of 9 bar codes. Printed characters were recognized by a neural net based optical character recognition algorithm.

3/87-10/88: AI Researcher, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Livermore, CA.

Designed and implemented five major AI systems: A cognitive path finder, a military strategy finder, an expert system shell, a vision recognition system, and a natural language speech system. These systems were based on the AI algorithms of heuristic search, game playing, knowledge representation, logic programming, and neural nets. These systems solve problems in military command and control. Published five papers. Implemented planning in command and control. The lab is patenting the cognitive path finder. Gave many presentations. Gave a class on AI. This class was distributed world wide. Gave a tutorial session on neural nets. Learned the Macintosh, inside and out. Learned Ada. Received an award for outstanding AI achievement. Presented work to several four-star generals, a deputy secretary of defense, and a nobel prize winner.

1/88-6/88: Instructor, Chabot, Livermore, CA.

I hold a California teaching certificate in mathematics.

9/86-3/87: President, Peak Technology, Colorado Springs, CO.

Designed, built, assembled, and marketed an IBM AT compatible personal computer. This included bringing up the operating system, fixing BIOS bugs, and fixing failed hardware and associated business responsibilities.

6/82-9/86: Principal Engineer, Digital Equipment Corporation, Colorado Springs, CO.

I was a member of an advanced development team building a database system with a strong knowledge component. This database system implements multiple data models, has an AI planner, learner, and reasoner. I designed an asynchronous and parallel file system for the database system and led the implementation team. I was the technical project leader of a relational database system and the technical project leader of a laser disk database system. I designed and implemented a text and graphics database system which contained a natural language like query language. I wrote a shadowing system for the database. I wrote a database monitor utility. I wrote a database performance analyzer. I designed an expert system layer on top of the relational data model. I wrote a query language. I wrote a MSCP architecture verification utility. I did an initial logic design of a sort board. I did prototype design of two VLSI chips.

6/82-9/86: Honorarium, University of Colorado in Colorado Springs.

I taught graduate level classes in computer architecture, expert systems and logic systems, database systems, knowledge based systems, natural language understanding, lisp, PROLOG, and advanced AI programming. I gave an invited paper at the DPMA conference on natural language understanding.I taught a class in expert systems at Digital which was video taped and distributed to several internal sites. I reviewed a book on concurrency control. I reviewed the papers for the data engineering conference. As a lecturer with students, I have built a small expert system shell called TWSPI, a frame system for common lisp, an object based system for common lisp, and an ATN parser for natural language. I duplicated the systems of ELIZA, STUDENT, PAM, and SAM to give my students examples of the technology behind natural language processing.

10/80-6/82: Computer Consultant, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA.

Designed and build a classified computer facility at SRI. Responsible for the VAX11/780 system running VMS. Installed the system, wrote device drivers, trained support staff, and did system manager duties. Detailed knowledge of system internals and VAX hardware. Chairman of the computer technical advisory committee.

9/78-10/80: Physicist, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA.

Basic research in computational modeling of fracture mechanics. Supervised a support staff and managed research projects. Published papers and delivered talks at Stanford University and the American Physical Society.

6/74-9/78: Physicist, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM.

Performed theoretical design of nuclear warheads. Developed a major advance in shape charge technology.

Experience

Computer Engineering

C, C++, Objective C, Lisp, Pascal, Assembly Programming, Postscript, SmallTalk, Simula, Fortran, Basic, VAX, Intel, Motorola, CDC, Cray, DEC 20, MIPs, SUN, PCs, Mac Toolbox, Windows, NeXTstep, BIOS, Unix, VMS, RDB, SQL, Transaction Processing, Client-Server, NeXT, PC mother board, board design, chip design, requirements, analysis, design, and implementation.

General

distributed systems, database systems, logic systems, artificial intelligence systems, health care information systems, military command and control, software development, object-based programming, graphical user interfaces, multi-media, natural language interfaces, hardware design, business management, project management, corporate strategies, marketing, teaching, and building companies.

Duities

President, CEO, VP Engineering, Director, Senior Consultant, Associate, Senior engineer, Chief Scientist.

Publications

• Burback: Distributed Computing Environment Lectures, 1997, ISBN 0-18-205-549-3
• Burback: Distributed Computing Environment Architecture, DECORUM97, March, 1997.
• Burback, Perrochon, Wiederhold: A Compiler for Composition: CHAIMS; Fifth International Symposium on Assessment of Software Tools and Technologies (SAST'97), Pittsburgh, June 3-5, 1997.
• The Distributed Computing Architecture using DCE Stanford University, 1996.
• The Distributed Computing Group Architecture and Plans Stanford University, 1995.
• Software Engineering Published by the Stanford University bookstore, 1994.
• The Health Care Architecture. Oceania internal report, 1992.
• The transaction processing architecture. Oceania internal report, 1992.
• The electronic patient chart architecture and query language. Oceania internal report, 1993.
• Encoding of clinical data. The structured encoding architecture (SEA). Oceania internal report, 1992.
• The Medical Data Information Architecture, MeDIA. Solving the problems of dynamic medical information. Oceania internal report, 1992.
• Unique names, states, and state transitions. Oceania internal report, 1992.
• The three layer approach to quality assurance. Hospital Oceania. Hoceania. Oceania internal report, 1992.
• Modern Analysis, Design, and Implementation Paradigm: Creative Chaos. ITI internal report. 1991
• The eight architectural view of a health care information system. TDS internal report, 1990.
• An object based design of the distributed patient record using the relational data model. TDS internal report, 1990.
• Artificial intelligence in medical decision support systems. TDS internal report, 1991.
• Using the Deductive Tableau System. Published by Chariot Distributions and Addison-Wesley 1990.
• The logical bases for computer science. Addison-Wesley, 1990. Zohar Manna and Richard Waldinger are the main authors. I am mentioned as a collaborating author.
• Prover: A first-order theorem system in Ada. 1987 AI and Ada Conference.
• Path Finder. Research at LLNL, 1987.
• Planning in Command and Control. Submitted for publication in IEEE Expert Systems.
• The War Gamer. Research at LLNL, 1987.
• Sparking Computer Smartness. The Quarterly, December, 1987
• RHYMES - A Text Combined with Graphics Database System. Digital internal report.
• The On Disk Structure for RDB/ELN. Digital internal report.
• The Architecture and Call Interface for the Database File System. Digital internal report.
• The Database Cache Design. Digital internal report.
• Hardware Support for Transactions: Virtual Transaction Memory. Digital internal report.
• The on Disk Structure for the Database File System. Digital internal report.
• System Objects Design, a First Cut. Digital internal report.
• How to get 5,000 Transactions per Seconds. Digital internal report.