Accomplishments
In the Fall of 2010, I joined the Chisel Lab, at the University of Victora, to begin my PhD under the supervision of Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey. My work is supported by a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).
I achieved my Masters of Science as a member of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. My masters work took place between the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2010, culminating in my defense on June 16th, 2010. My masters was also supported by a scholarship from NSERC.
During my masters, I have presented a number of publications. Most recently I presented my work on Understanding Search Behaviour at the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2009). I have also presented my masters work at the Search driven development, Users, Infrastructures, Testing and Evaluation workshop (SUITE) which took place at the International Conference on Software Evolution (ICSE 2009). Finally, I have presented another publication I was involved in at the Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2008).
In October 2005, I also founded my own business called Student Geeks Inc. The business is in the business of providing technical support to both businesses and individuals. This company provides hardware, virus removal, and software configuration support. Although this business venture only lasted a few years, it taught me a great deal about business, networking and communication.
Skills
During my time as Vice President of Internal Relations for the Computer Science Graduate Society, Vice President of Events for the Computer Science Undergraduate Society and as a project manager on course projects, I gained number of interpersonal skills. These include planning, organizating, co-ordinating, and communication skills. Due to the large amount of work load from both my courses, and these two positions, I also gained a large amount of experience with time management.
Interests
I am particularily interested in the human computer interaction, software engineering, tool support, search systems and web based systems areas of computer science. I have found that a number of existing software systems do not have a particular focus on how the user will use the system, the users strengths, and weaknesses.
Overall my biggest interest is making systems work for people.
Other Information
For anyone that is interested in more information about me, I recommend checking out my Curriculum Vitae, Publications and Projects. There is also more information regarding my work experience on my LinkedIn Profile or regarding more general topics on my Google Profile.
