Software Engineer IV, QSS Group, Inc., NASA Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, CA, USA

Mobile Agents Project (7/02 – present)

Mobile Agents is a project to develop an open agent-based architecture to support exploration missions. It includes the development of a distributed wireless surface exploration support system supporting a crew and remote science teams for the planning and execution of extra-vehicular activities (EVA’s). The system supports EVA plan management and tracking, automated recording of science data, robot commanding, health monitoring, navigational support and system monitoring using a voice controlled interface.

As the development lead of the Brahms sub team consisting of four people responsible for planning and managing the development of the Brahms agents and Brahms interfaces to systems external to Brahms.

As the software architect responsible for the design of the mobile agents architecture, managing the design of the Brahms agents, the interaction of these agents with one another and of these agents with the various support and control systems such as GPS sensors, health sensors, robots, system hardware, etc. Started the design of a service oriented architecture using J2EE where the Brahms software agents use the J2EE services to ensure robust persistence of telemetry, science data and state and to allow us to develop a wide variety of user interfaces for different user communities to retrieve and analyze the captured data. 

As a software engineer responsible for the requirements analysis and definition for the mobile agents project. Responsible for maintaining the requirements specification throughout the project and responsible for tracking the implementation of the requirements throughout the development cycle. Also responsible for signing off on the requirements after the implementation, testing and integration of various mobile agents functions.

As a software engineer responsible for the development of Brahms agents as part of the mobile agents system that include plan tracking agents, navigation assistants, medical assistants, science data assistants, and system assistants, and that include Brahms interfaces that include interfaces between Brahms agents and GPS sensors, bio sensors for monitoring heart rate and blood oxygen levels, EVA robots to control movement and camera’s, a speech recognizer (Nuance) and speech synthesizer (SAPI5, FreeTTS). The agents were developed using the Brahms language. The interfaces were developed using Java (J2SE 5.0), depending on the interface type using Corba (JacORB), Java Messaging Service (JBoss), TCP/IP sockets, and Java Native Interface to communicate with Windows COM objects and the kernel API.

Successfully field tested mobile agents for 3 years (’03, ’04, ’05) at the Mars Desert Research Station in Hanksville, UT with 2 geologists, 2 EVA Robotic Assistants and a remote science team, at Meteor Crater, AZ (’05) with 2 astronauts in pressurized space suits and a Scout rover and at Ames’ Marscape (’05) with one ‘astronaut’ and a K9 and Gromit rover.

Brahms Project (11/98 – present)

Brahms is a multi-agent intelligent agent and simulation environment used for modeling, simulating and analyzing work practice. Brahms is a data driven (forward chaining) discrete event simulation environment with extensions for the real-time execution of intelligent agents. This project is a continuation of work performed at Bell Atlantic, now Verizon. This work is continued at NASA Ames Research Center first as a contractor for Caelum Research Corporation (11/98 – 7/00), now as a contractor for QSS Group, Inc (7/00 – present)

As the development lead of the Brahms project responsible for planning and managing the development of the Brahms agent environment. Responsible for the development of development guidelines and coding standards. Responsible for supporting the developers in understanding Brahms and the development of the Brahms components.

As the system architect responsible for designing the short and long term system architecture for the Brahms agent environment to include the specification of the various Brahms components and their interaction in stand-alone systems and distributed architectures.

As a software engineer responsible for maintaining and expanding the Brahms language and Brahms compiler to support new agent capabilities. Details of the current language specification can be found at http://www.agentisolutions.com. The Brahms compiler is implemented using byacc and Java J2SE 5.0. The compiler generates XML to represent the Brahms compiled code. Specified the Document Type Definition for the Brahms code and implemented the XML generator using Java J2SE 5.0. The generated XML is used as the ‘byte code’ input for the Brahms virtual machine.

As a software engineer responsible for the requirements analysis, object oriented design and implementation of the Brahms Virtual Machine. The Brahms Virtual Machine loads in Brahms models from XML and starts the simulation of the Brahms agents. The Brahms VM generates a reasoning state network similar to a RETE network but with extensions and enhancements for Brahms. The reasoning state network maintains the state of all the Brahms frames (activity rules) and conditions that can be matched by agent’s beliefs and/or world facts. The Brahms VM includes a discrete event manager to synchronize time and distribute events to the agents in case of a simulation. Added support to the Brahms VM for real-time execution of Brahms agents as software agents and added an open API to allow virtual machine services to be loaded, to allow for agent activities to be developed using Java and to allow for an interface for external agents to interact with Brahms agents. Added support for an agent directory service and to allow agents hosted in different virtual machines to communicate with eachother in a distributed environment without requiring the agent developer to change any Brahms code. The Brahms VM is implemented in Java using J2SE 5.0 and Sun’s XML parser.

As a software engineer responsible for porting the Brahms Agent Viewer graphical user interface application from Visual Basic to Java using Swing and migrating the underlying database from MS Access to MySQL 4.x developing the database interfaces using JDBC 2.x and SQL managing database creation and deletion, parsing of the history file generated by the Brahms virtual machine to the database using inserts and querying the database for displaying data using prepared statements.

As a software engineer responsible for developing a dockable window framework for the Brahms integrated development environment (IDE) using JDK 1.3 based on Swing components that allow users to organize their desktop windows in a way most productive to them. The dockable window framework emulates the behaviors found in Microsoft’s Visual Studio applications.

As a software engineer responsible for the development of the Brahms model builder prototype allowing model builders to create and browse Brahms models. The model builder is implemented using Java jdk 1.1.8 and Swing 1.1.1.

As a software engineer responsible for the requirements analysis, object oriented design and implementation of the Brahms virtual reality environment prototype that visualizes the activities performed by the agents in a Brahms simulation run in a three dimensional view. The virtual reality environment prototype is implemented using Java jdk 1.2, Swing 1.1.1 and Java 3D using VRML as the format in which the scene and scene elements are defined.

As a software engineer responsible for the requirements analysis, object oriented design and implementation of the Brahms Enterprise JavaBeans server prototype with support for stateless session beans but no transaction management implemented using Java jdk 1.1.8 and RMI. The server is to be used to host Brahms server side components written as EJBs. The EJB Server is based on the EJB specification V1.0. The EJB Server also includes a database service allowing for connectivity to multiple databases using connection pools. The database service uses JDBC to connect to databases.

As a software engineer developed a proposal for the TESS project to replace the non Y2K compliant trouble entry system used for trouble entry, tracking and reporting for large business customers. Designed and implemented a prototype as a proof of concept for a web enabled trouble entry solution for use by Bell Atlantic’s customer service representatives. The prototype is implemented in Java using Swing as the user interface class library. For this application developed a Windows 98 look and feel, substituting the available Swing look and feels.

As a development lead responsible for the planning and managing of the development of the TESS client with a project team consisting of three developers, a technical writer and a subject matter expert. Also responsible for reporting and tracking issues and requirements with the customer.

As a software engineer together with the client team responsible for the requirements analysis for the entire TESS system as part of a contractual agreement with the customer, and the object oriented design, implementation and unit testing of the TESS client. The design is created using the unified modeling language (UML). The implementation is in Java using jdk 1.1.6 and Swing 1.0.2.

Project Compendium Project (12/97 – 3/98)
Project Compendium is a conversational modeling tool allowing for capturing discussions, notes, requirements, designs, issues and more between a team using a graphical representation linking questions, ideas and information. Project Compendium provides interfaces to MS Word and MS Excel for transparent display of discussion results and information in popular formats.

As a software engineer responsible for the design and implementation of an interface between Questmap (an existing conversational modeling tool) and a MS Access database with a graphical visualization interface on top of the application to verify imported data. The application is designed using UML and implemented using Java with Microsoft’s AFC and the JDBC-ODBC bridge. Started the design and implementation of a three tier client-server converational modeling tool with a web enabled interface using Swing and using RMI between the client and server. The work is continued by other developers due to the higher priority of the TESS project.

Customer Service Manager (CSM) Project (12/97)
The Customer Service Manager System allows for measuring and displaying of the performance of frame relay networks.

As a software engineer responsible for the design and implementation of a web enabled prototype to view statistical data, in the form of bar charts, about the performance of frame relay networks. The client is implemented using Java and a dbAnywhere middleware server is used as the interface to the database containing the captured performance data.

Brahms Project (6/95 – 12/97)
Brahms is a multi-agent intelligent agent and simulation environment used for modeling, simulating and analyzing work practice.

As a software engineer responsible for the design of the Brahms language (in BNF) for modeling activity based work processes and developing agent based applications. For this language designed and implemented an object oriented compiler. The design of the compiler was realized using the unified modeling language. The implementation was realized using Yacc and Java. The user interface was developed in Java using Microsoft’s AFC class library.

CommonKADS, SDM (System Development Methodology developed by Cap Volmac), Yourdon Structured Analysis and Design

Object Oriented Analysis and Design using UML (Use Case Analysis, OMT, STD, DFD, ERD)

Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0, Microsoft Frontpage, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project, Select Enterprise, Symantec Visual Café, Borland JBuilder 2005, Eclipse 3.x, Gensym G2, CVS

Languages

AionDS, Assembler, C, C++, Demos, Eiffel, G2, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Lex&Yacc, Modula, Perl, Prolog, SNAP, SQL, TURBO Pascal, Visual Basic, XML, DTD

JDK 1.0.2-1.5.x, AWT, Swing, JDBC, JNDI, JNI, RMI, CORBA, J2EE, EJB 3,x Sockets, Threads, JMS, Java 3D, Javadoc, MS SAPI 5.x, FreeTTS, Nuance Speech System, GPS (NMEA)

Informix RDBMS, Oracle RDBMS 6.0 (Forms, Reportwriter, Embedded SQL), Unify RDBMS/ACCELL, MySQL 4.x, MS-Access

Sun Solaris 2.x, MS-DOS/Windows 3.1/95/98/NT4/2000/XP, Linux RedHat/Fedora Core, Mac OS X