Wolniewicz.com

Wolniewicz family experiences

Career Objective - Big Data

I deliver value through the application of machine learning and statistical technology to big data, delivering deep and actionable business insights, by applying effective people, organizational, and software process management skills.

Employment Experience

  1. Sr. Director, Machine Learning Group, J.D. Power & Associates, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies, 2008-present
    • I manage a multifunctional technology team responsible for research, development, and operations of natural language processing (NLP) systems for market research using social media.
    • Our systems process millions of social media posts daily, index and search against them for relevant content, then apply NLP algorithms to assess sentiment and speaker demographics.
    • The NLP algorithms run in a grid computing environment using a distributed REST-based resource-oriented architecture for robustness and scalability.
  2. V.P. Engineering, Umbria Corporation, 2007-2008 - acquired by J.D. Power & Associates in April 2008
    • Umbria was an early leader in the use of NLP for market research of social media such as blogs and message boards.
    • I oversaw the Engineering department, introducing agile development (Scrum) and moving the distributed system towards a REST-based resource-oriented architecture.
  3. Senior Manager, Amazon.com, 2004-2007
    • Managed a group of teams responsible for development and operations of site content management software, including real-time content optimization using stastical algorithms against live clickstream and purchasing data, as well as platform systems including the services aggregation layer and rich media services.
    • Page owner of Gateway, Browse, and Detail Page applications, accounting for 45% of site traffic.
    • Unified multiple legacy systems into Amazon's Single Content Platform.
  4. Vice President Engineering, CSG Analytics, CSG Systems, International, 2001-2004
    • Manager of CSG Analytics division, responsible for delivery of machine-learning software, interactions with Product Management, Sales and customer engagements related to analytic technology.
    • Responsible for CSG's ProfitNow! CRM Analytics software and the associated Advanced Technology Group (ATG) of machine learning scientists.
  5. Vice President, Engineering, Athene Software Inc., 1998-2001 - acquired by CSG Systems in 2001
    • Athene was a startup that predicted customer churn and profitability (upsell) opportunities using machine learning techniques, improving customer care for telecommunications companies.
    • Assembled a highly qualified software development team from scratch, reaching 45 engineers in 2001. Oversight of all product development, research, technology and support staff.
    • Successful Series B ($4.25M) and C ($15.3M) financing rounds.
    • Established standards for new organization, and successfully delivered enterprise applications on schedule.
    • Products included APT Churn 1.0-3.1 and APT Profitability 1.0-1.1. Customers included The Microsoft Network (MSN), DutchTone (FTMI Netherlands division).
  6. Partner, Database Specialist, Flatirons Computing, Inc., 1997-1998
    • Founding partner of Flatirons Computing, a Boulder software consulting firm.
    • Specialized in data modeling for object oriented systems and the binding of object oriented software systems to relational databases.
    • Consulting experience includes full life cycle development, initial design, existing design evaluation and training.
  7. Software Manager, HeurisTec Corp., 1996-1997
    • Managed 6 person team implementing a client/server version of HeurisTec's advanced labor scheduling system for the supermarket industry.
    • Key technologies include Windows 95 / Windows NT, Visual C++, Visual Basic, ODBC, COM/DCOM.
    • Object-Oriented design methodologies, OMT modeling.
  8. Database Technical Lead, XVT Software, Inc., 1994-1996
    • Designed and developed portable C and C++ database access libraries to integrate XVT's portable Graphical User Interface (GUI) libraries, C++ application framework and visual development tools with relational database systems via ODBC.
    • Responsible for all aspects of development cycle, including requirements analysis, design, scheduling, implementation, testing, porting and packaging. Participated in early marketing of products at trade shows and interacted with customers evaluating XVT's software solutions.
    • Original author of XVT's ODBC++, a portable C++ class library for accessing relational databases via ODBC.
  9. Researcher / Software Engineer, First Class Systems, Inc., 1993-1994
    • Part-owner of Colorado Springs software company specializing in grade tracking software for teachers.
    • Designed and implemented a portable relational database execution engine for workstations and personal computers (UNIX, IBM, Macintosh).
    • Developed a prototype scientific database system in conjunction with the University of Colorado's Space Grant College, including a customized query optimizer, a scripting language for expressing queries and specialized execution operations for evaluating numeric algorithms within the database execution engine.
  10. Graduate Research Assistant, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1991-1993
    • Researched adaptation of advanced database technology- including query optimization, parallelism and operator evaluation- to non-traditional database applications.
    • Joint project of University of Colorado Computer Science Department and the University of Colorado's Space Grant College. Also part of National Science Foundation (NSF) Grand Challenge project in Computational Turbulence.
  11. Professional Research Assistant, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), University of Colorado, Boulder, 1985-1991 (includes Undergraduate Research Assistantship 1985-1988)
    • Flight Controller & Command Controller for the Solar Mesosphere Explorer (SME) satellite. Responsible for all aspects of real-time satellite operations.
    • Developed and adapted software and hardware for real-time reception and processing of satellite data in mission-critical environments.

Education

Skills

  • Strong software management and organizational skills.
  • Use of big data and statistical techniques in real-time environments to directly impact business performance.
  • Experienced with agile software development, particularly Scrum. I have introduced agile into organizations without agile experience.
  • Distributed / web software architecture experience.
  • Management accounting and corporate finance.
  • Deep knowledge of database systems, including both internal components and client interfaces.
  • Applied data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing experience.
  • Programming experience in J2EE, C++, Pearl, Ruby, Ada, FORTRAN, MATLAB, and others.
  • Object oriented analysis and design.
  • Real-time application development experience, including live clickstream data processing, data reception and transmission components for satellite control systems, and coding for spacecraft embedded systems.
  • Portability and internationalization experience with a wide variety of platforms and operating systems, including Linux, Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, other Unix variants, and Windows.
  • Solid customer interaction skills.

Publications

Lian Yan, Robert Dodier, Michael Mozer, Richard Wolniewicz, Optimizing Classifier Performance via an Approximation to the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney Statistic, at 20th International Conference on Machine Learning, Washington, D.C., August 2003.

Michael C. Mozer, Robert Dodier, Michael D. Colagrosso, César Guerra-Salcedo, Richard Wolniewicz, Prodding the ROC Curve: Constrained Optimization of Classifier Performance, at Neural Information Processing Systems conference, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2001.

L. Yan, D. Miller, M. C. Mozer, R. Wolniewicz, Improving Prediction of Customer Behavior in Nonstationary Environments, Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Washington, D.C., 2001.

M. C. Mozer, R. H. Wolniewicz, E. Johnson, and H. Kaushansky. Churn reduction in the wireless industry. S. A. Solla, T. K. Leen & K.-R. Mueller (Eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 12. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

M.C. Mozer, R. H. Wolniewicz, D. Grimes, E. Johnson, H. Kaushansky, Predicting subscriber dissatisfaction and improving retention in the wireless telecommunications industry. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 11, 690-696, 2000.

R. H. Wolniewicz, M. C. Mozer, R. Dodier, C. Guerra, L. Yan, Enhancing the value of your CRM Solution through the use of Data Representation, Proceedings of CRM Infrastructure, IBC Global Conferences, London, England, September, 2000.

R. H. Wolniewicz, "Algebraic Optimization of Computations over Scientific Databases", Ph.D. Thesis, University of Colorado, 1994.

R. H. Wolniewicz, G. Graefe, "Algebraic Optimization of Computations over Scientific Databases", Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Dublin, Ireland, August, 1993.

G. Graefe, R. H. Wolniewicz, "Algebraic Optimization and Parallel Execution of Computations over Scientific Databases", Proc. Workshop on Metadata Management in Scientific Databases, Salt Lake City, UT, November 3-5, 1992.

G. Graefe, R. L. Cole, D. L. Davison, W. J. McKenna and R. H. Wolniewicz, "Extensible Query Optimization and Parallel Execution in Volcano", in Query Processing for Advanced Database Applications, J. C. Freytag, G. Vossen and D. Maier (editors), Morgan-Kaufman, San Mateo, CA, 1992.

Personal Information

  • Eagle Scout.

Résumé

Richard H. Wolniewicz
5560 Colt Drive
Longmont, CO 80503
(720) 378-1868

Email: richard -at-
wolniewicz.com