Romel Rivera

Java Consultant

Resume

 

 

 

Minneapolis, MN, 55406 USA

 

 

GOAL

 

To participate from a position of technical leadership in the project management, analysis, design or development of Java applications.

 

SUMMARY

 

Over 15 years of experience as a software designer, architect, developer, project manager and analyst.  Proficient in the design and implementation of layered, highly-reusable Java architectures with intuitive user interfaces.  Recent consultant as 1) Hbase & Hadoop Java Architect for a credit card market  profitability segmentation application using Amazon AWS EC2 and EMR (see www.eknowlogie.com/Papers/AggregationWithHadoopHBase.pdf), 2) Java Architect for WolfNet, where he designed a RESTful services architecture with an underlying dynamic data layer and developed a plan for the staged migration of the Company's flagship search engine application to Java, 2) sole Java Architect and Developer of high-visibility projects at Pearson VUE, 3) sole Java Architect and Developer in the creation and construction of Swing-based CardProfit (consisting of 116,540 Java lines, 1,064 classes, 198 packages), a strategic banking business intelligence application used to increase the profitability of credit card products in multi-dimensionally segmented markets, now marketed by Global Payments and Visa International (see screenshots at http://www.eknowlogie.com/CardProfit), 4) project manager for Knights of Columbus’s corporate migration to Java where he successfully created, configured and managed a distributed team of Minneapolis and offshore developers (based in India, Ukraine, Romania & Costa Rica) resulting in a 80% project budget reduction,  and 5) Java Developer for United Health.  Mr. Rivera has been offered return contracts in all consulting positions he has held.

Past projects include architect, designer and lead developer (in a team of two) of the eKnowlogie automatic source-code Migrator from ColdFusion to the Java J2EE MVC architecture (consisting of 192,450 lines of Java, 898 classes and 104 packages). Creator, designer, architect and lead developer of the Xinotech interactive software refactoring environment, which sold at $250,000 per copy, and was selected by Lockheed Martin and the US Air Force to automatically transform the F-16’s and F-117 NightHawk’s embedded software systems, and by large IT organizations, such as AXA and France Telecom, to modernize large-scale applications for Year 2000 and Euro.  As CTO of Xinotech Research from 93 to 99, negotiated strategic alliances and established distribution, cooperation and customer agreements with the largest IT, aerospace, software and hardware companies in the USA and Europe. As principal investigator, was awarded 20 national research contracts from DARPA, NSF, USAF and others.   As a developer, has written over 500,000 lines of code, including more than 300,000 lines of Java.

EDUCATION

 

Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science, University of Minnesota,  1987, GPA: 3.95/4.  Thesis Topic: Incremental Event-Driven Compilation.

Master of Science, Computer Science, University of Minnesota, 1984, GPA 3.93/4. Thesis Topic: Design and Implementation of Transparent Seamless Language Extensions to Support Remote Method Invocation in a Local Area Network.

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Monterrey Institute of Technology, Mexico, 1982, GPA 9.4/10 Thesis Topic:  Implementation of a Parser Generator Using Augmented Operator Grammars.

Academic Honors: Ranked number 1 in WPE annual doctoral and masters written examination at the University of Minnesota. Lincoln-Juarez Scholarship at Monterrey Institute of Technology for all 8 semesters.  Ranked number 1 out of 128 in Colegio La Salle high school, Managua, Nicaragua, ranked number 1 in every year of primary and secondary school.  Ranked number 1 in the National High School Examination.

LANGUAGES AND SYSTEMS

 

Languages: Java (10 years), Java 7 (including multi-threading and hyper-threading); Groovy, SQL, UML, XML, XML Schema, DTD, XSLT (both for XML object repository queries and for generating HTML dynamically), HTML, XHTML, CSS; JSON, ColdFusion, Modula-2, Pascal, Ada, C, Fortran; Mainframe: COBOL, PL/I, MFS, CICS, BMS, JCL, various assembler languages. Scripting: JavaScript, Ant, JCL.

Frameworks 

·         Enterprise & Development: JAX-RS, RESTful Web Services, Jersey 1.14, JAXB, SOAP, WSDL, EE, JMS, IBM MQ, JNDI, Log4J, JUnit, JavaCC, Java Tree Builder. 

·         Persistence: JPA, EJB, JDBC, MyBatis 3.1, TopLink, Jakarta Slide XML object repository. 

·         Presentation: JSP, Java Swing, Java AWT, JavaFX 2.2, GWT 2.5, Aliorsum.

·         Application Frameworks: Spring 3.1 Core, Spring 3.1 MVC, Struts 1.

·         XML: JDOM, SAX, DOM, Apache Xerces, Apache Xalan, Xdoclets, JSON.

Servers and Containers: GlassFish 3.1, Apache Tomcat 7.0, JBOSS (JMX, JPDA for remote debugging), IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, Spring 3.1, MS IIS.

Databases

·         Big Data, Cloud Computing and NoSQL: Hbase 0.92.1, MapReduce, Hadoop 1.0.3, HDFS, Neo4j, Amazon AWS (EMR, EC2, S3, CloudWatch, ElasticFox 1.7), Hive, Ganglia, Apache Whirr, Jakarta Slide XML object repository.

·         SQL: Microsoft SQL Server 9.0 (SQL Server Management Studio), Oracle 9i, Oracle 9i PL/SQL Developer, Toad, Oracle 9i TopLink, MySQL, PointBase SQL.

·         Legacy:  IMS, IDMS

Development Platforms and Tools: Eclipse 3.7.2 for Java 7.0 and EE (AWS Management Plugin, Genuitec MyEclipse 3.8.1), IntelliJ IDEA, WSAD (IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer), JBuilder, Oracle PL/SQL for Developers, Oracle 9i TopLink ORM, Rational Rose, Visual Paradigm for UML, Poseidon for UML, MS Visio, Visual Age for Java, Apache Ant 1.6.2, SVN, Git, CVS (server & client), Perforce, TeamCity, PVCS, Team Foundation Server TFS, Rational ClearQuest, VersionOne, @Task; mainframe platforms (IMS, IDMS, MFS, CICS, BMS, JCL).

Operating Systems: Windows 7 & XP, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows NT, Windows 98, Linux Ubuntu 12.04, Unix Solaris, MacOS, DOS, MVS.

Methodologies:  Scrum, Agile prototyping iterative methodologies, services-oriented architectures, UML, OOP, Spring, OO design patterns in Java, e.g. Inversion of Control, Dependency Injector, DAO, Visitor [Gamma 95], Observer (Model/View) with Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) Update Manager [Gamma 95], Iterator [Gamma 95], Composite [Gamma 95], Interpreter [Gamma 95], Polymorphism [Larman 98], etc.

 

WORK EXPERIENCE

 

Consultant, Big Data Java Architect and Sr Developer for Global Payments, Inc.

November  2011 - Present 

 

Mr. Rivera was commissioned to design and develop a Big Data architecture to serve as a back-end for CardProfit (a tool for monitoring profitabiliy of credit card products in segmented markets, see www.eknowlogie.com/Papers/AggregationWithHadoopHBase.pdf).  This architecture would allow the extraction of arbitrary market segmentations characterizing credit card transactional behavior in order to analyze and guide profitability. The system offers a JPA/MySQL credit card transactional model exported to an HBase/Hadoop/Amazon EC2 cloud architecture, where market segmentations can be derived and maintained using incremental MapReduce algorithms (e.g. for high-performance bulk loads, inverted indexing for cross-sectional scans, etc). These segmentations are then exposed to CardProfit, a profitability analysis tool via Tomcat/RESTEasy. HBase indexing is designed to provide geographical, product and time localization for MapReduce job distribution.  Mr Rivera has served so far as the sole architect, developer and sys admin for this project. Languages and Platforms Used: Java 7, NoSQL Big Data (“BigData”) Hbase 0.92.1, Hadoop 1.0.3, HDFS, and Neo4J (for evaluation), Amazon AWS (EMR, EC2, S3, CloudWatch, ElasticFox 1.7), MapReduce, RESTful Web Services, JAXB, JSON, GWT 2.5, Apache Whirr, Linux Ubuntu 12.04, Eclipse 3.7.2 with AWS Management Plugin, SVN 1.7.

 

 

Consultant, Project Director and Sr Java Architect for Mitsubishi Electric in Japan.

February 2012 – April 2012

 

Proposed and negotiated fixed-price contract to migrate and redesign their procurement application from ColdFusion to Java.  Upgraded the eKnowlogie ColdFussion to Java Migrator to support automatic translation into a Java MVC architecture using Spring 3.1 MVC and MyBatis 3.1 ORM. Selected and managed an off-shore team in India to perform actual conversion. Languages and Platforms Used:  Java 7 EE, Spring 3.1 MVC, MyBatis 3.1. ORM, JSP,  Eclipse, Oracle 9i, SVN.

 

 

Consultant, Sr Java Developer for DRC.

October 2011 – December 2011

 

Developed Java Swing artifacts and architectural reorganizations for the company's products. Contract was pre-established to be short-term due to Mr. Rivera scheduling restrictions.  After 2 weeks into this contract, Mr. Rivera was offered a new contract for all of 2012. Languages and Platforms Used:  Java 6, multi-threading, Swing, JavaFX 2.2, XML, Team Foundation Server 2010.

 

 

Consultant, Java Architect & Sr Java Developer for WolfNet.

April 2011 – September 2011

 

·     Developed a comprehensive plan for the staged migration of the Company's real state search engine application from ColdFusion to Java. Designed a service-oriented architecture in Java for internal/external consumption.  This architecture included a public conceptual domain model mapped dynamically to an ever-changing, idiosyncratic, massive physical SQL layer.

·     The Company's search application requires extensive, intersecting configuration for the following contexts: over 300 MLS markets, affiliates, resellers, brokers and agents. Designed and implemented an external configuration platform using XML resource bundles for arbitrary number of contexts. These resource bundles can be partially qualified, and they cascade dynamically to implicitly qualifying contexts.

·     Member in a maintenance/migration team of 6 using Scrum (as scrum master managed 40 team tasks in  2-week sprints and coordinated with business, customer service, database and development).   

·     Mr. Rivera was offered a Java contract position for 2012. Languages and Platforms Used:  Java 6, REST services, JAX-RS, Jersey 1.8, JPA, XML, JDOM, Eclipse, GlassFish 3.1, MS SQL Server 9.0, Toad, MS SQL Server Mgmt Studio, Git, @Task, ColdFusion.

 

Consultant, Principal Java Architect and Sr Developer for eKnowlogie and Global Payments, Inc.

March  2006 – July 2008, February 2010 – March 2011

 

·     Sole Creator, Designer and Developer of CardProfit. CardProfit is a business intelligence  application for the banking industry, used to increase the profitability of credit card and payments products in multi-dimensional segmented markets through a  benchmark-driven process for maximum potential value source identification to support goal setting, valuation and monitoring. CardProfit extracts information from the bank’s various transactional and accounting databases and builds object models with more than 1100 primary variables which are specific to the credit card Issuer and Acquirer businesses.  Banks can design their own arbitrary hierarchical market segmentation models, for example, by credit card brand, by credit card purpose, by geographical distribution, by cardholder socioeconomic strata, by marketing campaigns (“harvests”) etc.  These segmentations can be cross-referenced, for example, to measure profitability of a particular credit card product within a given social stratum in a given geographical region.  Banks can design their internal  benchmark catalogs from performance unit indicators. Goals are expressed as unit indicators and valuated in terms of total monetary figures.  Goal monitoring isolates adverse and favorable performances at all levels in the segmentation hierarchies. CardProfit consists of 116,540 lines of Java, 1,064 classes, 198 packages and 12 Eclipse projects.  Mr. Rivera was the sole designer, architect and developer for this product.  The first release of the product (73,247 lines) was completed by Mr. Rivera in 8 months. The product design includes a reflexive generics visitor architecture that supports the visitation of arbitrary object structures, and simultaneoulsy for collections or like object structures, automating the implementation of content-independent, tree-oriented aggregation operations such as prorating, consolidation and totalization, and the generation of UI models (such as hierarchical tree table models) from any content.  CardProfit's design also includes an in-house implementation-independent UI architecture which isolates the application from specific Spring-injected rendering implementations (e.g. Swing, SWT, GWT), and supported with an in-house new event broadcasting platform. CardProfit's architecture also makes use of Java 7's fine-grain parallelism for improving throughput.  Mr. Rivera established marketing relationships with channel partners Miami-based Visa International, Global Payments in Latin America, and PromoSoft in Europe.  This product has already been installed for banks in Latin America. Languages and Platforms Used: Java 7 with multi-threading and hyper-threading, J2EE, Swing, XML, Spring Core, SQL and JDBC, SOAP Web Services, Java reflection with generics, visitor and other patterns, Eclipse, Subversion, MS SQL Server.  See http://www.eknowlogie.com/CardProfit.

 

Consultant, Business Analyst, Java Architect and Sr Developer for Pearson VUE.

August  2008 – January 2010

 

Pearson VUE delivers proctored examinations on behalf of its clients, throughout their 5,000 testing centers worldwide.  Originally contracted for a six-month project, contract was extended several times for subsequent assignments and was informally offered a full-time position frequently.  Assignments were typically as sole designer and developer of the highest visibility projects at that time.               
 

·       Business Analyst, Java Architect and Sr Developer, Web-Based Exam Delivery. Originally contracted as sole individual to autonomously perform complete project  life cycle responsibilities including business and functional requirement analysis, third-party technology evaluation and selection, technical contact point for the Company’s partners, software design direction and  detailed design, Java development, testing and development of technical marketing materials for the Company's  prospective partners. This enhancement to the existing Pearson VUE's Athena desktop, proctored exam delivery system  would allow QTI (the standard XML-based exam description language) to be extended to specify that exam units  could be delivered locally from the desktop (through pre-existing capabilities) or remotely and securely from the web as part of a seamless exam session. The QTI XML compiler and the QTI exam delivery driver were extended so that web exam units dispatched by the driver could establish secure connections with third-party web exam delivery servers and deliver the exam unit via an embedded secure browser seamlessly controlled by the desktop delivery  driver.  Third-party Microsoft COM to Java bridges were evaluated and selected, embedded HTML browser technologies were  evaluated and selected including Java-based and native browsers.  The lifecycle deliverables included a 22-page business and  functional requirements document, a 17-page design direction document outlining a layered architecture with interchangeable  COM bridges and interchangeable embedded browser capabilities, a 20-page detailed design document, multiple prototype implementations to contrast third-party technology capabilities in an agile prototyping iterative design process,  a multi-layered Java  implementation consisting of 55 new classes, an enhancement to the QTI User's Guide, and a public API document for marketing and distribution to third-party Internet exam delivery providers. The project was completed ahead of schedule  and without adding additional human resources to the project as previously anticipated. Internet-based exam delivery  was used in production as scheduled with the initial customer throughout the Pearson VUE testing centers and without  any technical flaws. Languages and tools used: Java 1.6,  XML, Spring, RESTful Web Services, Jersey, Groovy, UML, IntelliJ IDEA, TeamCity, Eclipse, Perforce, Rational ClearQuest, Ant, JacoZoom, TeamDev's JExplorer and JXBrowser.

 

·       Java Architect and Sr Developer,  RTF to QTI XML Translator. Contract extension to serve as sole designer and developer of the most visible  Company project for 2009. A vast volume of client exam repositories contained RTF fragments for text  and graphics representation and it was necessary to move such clients away from an exam  format no longer licensed to the Company, to QTI (the Company's standard XML-based exam description language).  This required that RTF exam fragments be converted to QTI in order to preserve such client base. This conversion required the translation of the RTF intersecting command structure to the purely hierarchical QTI XML tree representation. A "Tiger" team was selected within the Company's Athena group, of which Mr Rivera was solely assigned to the central piece, the Converter (which would be designed and developed from scratch by Mr. Rivera despite previously existing attempts already developed in house). Deliverables included position papers and prototypes to support the evaluation of conversion vs. RTF reuse alternatives, a detailed design document, and a Java implementation of more than 60 classes. The project was completed and delivered ahead of schedule using agile prototyping iterative methodologies and without requiring additional human resources assigned to the Converter (the presumed bottleneck of the project).  Languages and tools used: Java 1.6, XML, Spring, JavaCC, UML, IntelliJ IDEA, TeamCity, Perforce, Rational ClearQuest, Version One for iterative agile development, Ant.

 

 

Consultant, Project Manager and Java Architect for the Knights of Columbus, USA.

March 2007 – February 2008

 

• Project Manager and Principal Java Architect. Point of contact and solely responsible for the migration of the KofC ColdFusion applications to Java J2EE with JSP and Struts, including team selection, conversion, development, quality control, testing and delivery.  Wrote the team project organization, interaction and productivity guidelines, selected, installed and managed the development environment tools for remote cooperation, selected and hired the team members, managed a team of 12 developers, made conversion and development decisions, distributed work among team members, designed the conversion and delivery schedule for the customer.  The team included local developers in Minneapolis as well as offshore developers in Eastern Europe, India and Costa Rica, therefore Mr. Rivera’s role included locating, interviewing, selecting and contracting the most reliable, productive and cost-effective offshore developers.  This project was completed successfully, on schedule, within the targeted standards of quality and 80% under budget.  Languages and Platforms Used: Subversion, Microsoft SQL, Eclipse, Java 6.0, J2EE, JSP, Struts, XML.

 

 

Consultant, Java Architect and Senior Developer for United Health Group.

November  2004 – January 2006

 

• Java Architect and Sr Developer. Architect and developer in the design and development of a common services-oriented (message-oriented, asynchronous), transaction-intensive application framework.  This framework is designed to support new application development as well as integration to pre-existing applications.  The first EAI use for this framework is the integration of 96 applications and interfaces with the company’s new Peradigm/Diamond-based claim processing system.  Designed and implemented a service dispatcher on top of JMS and MQ, and sample services such as FTP over  SSL, SSH.  Designed a batch and interactive services-oriented architecture with an object-relational mapping for health insurance customer fulfillment.  Sole developer of this fulfillment services framework to be used by fulfillment application developers, which included a SAX-based XML serializer from arbitrary sources, (e.g. Java objects, SQL result sets) such that object serialization could be customized by reducing or augmenting the class properties to be serialized.  Even though it was designed and implemented in 2 days, this serializer is more user-friendly and has more functionality than the prevaling industry standard XML serializer from Castor. United Health Group is a Fortune 100 company. Languages and Platforms Used: UML, Java, J2EE, EJB, JDBC, JMS, IBM MQ, JNDI, Log4J, JUnit, SAX, DOM, XML, SQL, Rational Rose, IBM WSAD (WebSphere Studio Application Developer), Eclipse 3.X, WAS (WebSphere Application Server), JBOSS, JMX, PVCS, Perot Systems’ Diamond / Peradigm, Oracle 9i, Oracle 9i TopLink ORM, Oracle 9I Stored Procedures, PL/SQL Developer, SOAP Web Services, business objects, WSDL, Group One’s Doc1, MS Visio, MS IIS, Windows 2000 Professional, LotusNotes.

 

Consultant, Strategic Technology Advisor, HSBC Bank, Panama, and MACOSA

June  2005 – August 2005

 

·         Strategic Technology Advisor.  Mr. Rivera’s role was to provide strategic advise to HSBC of Panama (formerly Banistmo) support the bank’s transition from older Microsoft’s technologies to Java and to evaluate preferred vendors’ proposed architectures.   Mr. Rivera served as advisor to HSBC vendor MACOSA in the design of a state-of-the-art new Java architecture for their 6 million line product suite with installation base of 70 banks.  The proposed architecture was J2EE (without EJB’s and a J2EE container), it supported nested multi-threaded services with nested distributed transactions and sub-transactional hyper-threading.   Service dispatching was transparent, dynamically interchangeable between SOAP, JMS messaging and pooled hyper-threading, hidden behind a common concurrency model.  Service payload externalization was transparent, dynamically negotiated between hidden client and service provider mediators.  Persistency was transparent through POJO’s.

 

 

Consultant, Project Director and Java Architect for The Hartford Life Insurance, Bell Helicopter, Industry Canada, Eniro Sverige AB, Hartford Life Insurance, Procter & Gamble, etc.

January  2003 – November 2004

 

• Architect and Java Developer. Led the redesign and redevelopment of Java applications on behalf of eKnowlogie, Inc., for The Hartford Life Insurance, Bell Helicopter, Eniro Sverige, Industry Canada, Procter & Gamble and others.  These projects primarily consisted of application redesigns into the Java Model-View-Controller architecture with Struts and EJB’s.  Eniro Sverige’s Bilguiden is arguably the most complete and intelligent application for automobile buying and selling in the world. Languages and Platforms Used: Java, J2EE, JSP, EJB, JDBC, BEA Weblogic, IBM WebSphere, JBuilder, UML, SQL, Oracle, Visual Paradigm for UML, ColdFusion, Windows XP.

 

 

 

Consultant, Project Director and Java Architect for General Motors,

March  2003 – December  2003

 

• Architect and Java Developer. Led the redesign and redevelopment of 42 General Motors applications from ColdFusion to J2EE on behalf of eKnowlogie, Inc.  Led the design and development of the common application framework for these applications.  This project included the design of an SQL JDBC architecture to support multiple forms of frameworks for local and global datasource connection management. Application design aspects were embedded in the eKnowlogie to Java Migrator to support the semi-automated migration to Java.  This project was completed under-budget and 40% ahead of schedule.  These sites had been originally written in ColdFusion. Languages and Platforms Used: Java, J2EE, JSP, LDAP, SMTP, JDBC, SQL Oracle, JBuilder, BEA WebLogic, Windows NT/XP.

 

 

Consultant, Java Architect and Sr Developer for JCafe, Minneapolis, MN

September  2001 – June 2002

 

• Architect and Java Developer, the Company's Learning Center. Sole re-designer and re-developer of the GUI and back-end server-side architecture for this ASP and  Internet product. The new Java system design uses WebDAV-based Apache Jakarta Slide XML object repository and content management system with XSLT and JDOM on the back-end. The  Java OO model, the backbone of the design, hides back-end repository dependencies and is independent of front-end UI transaction logic. A front-end Java layer supports server-side UI controller logic, with Jakarta Struts JSP custom-tags library to enforce the MVC model and isolate UI controller logic away from the JSP's. Redesign considerations for server architecture and GUI included simplicity, flexibility, reliability, scalability, performance, object-orientation, n-tier separation, and risk minimization of strategic investment on all underlying technologies.  The new GUI design is simple, conceptual, intuitive, modular and highly scalable, well-poised to harbor future evolution.  Created new design and implementation standards for the various tiers of this architecture, in order to allow the preservation of this design.  This project was undertaken in the middle of a pressing deadline, was delivered ahead of schedule and under-budget.  Was able to include the initially-excluded new GUI design and development under the same original schedule and budget, all of which produced a very stable first release. Languages and Platforms Used: Java, Apache Jakarta Slide object repository, XML, XSLT (both for querying the object repository and for creating HTML dynamically), XML Schema, DTD, JDOM, Apache Xerces, Apache Xalan, PointBase SQL, JSP, the Apache Jakarta Struts JSP custom-tags library, JSP, Apache Tomcat 4.0, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JBuilder, Windows NT/XP.

 

• Project Director, JDBC Realm Authentication.  This project consisted of the implementation of user authentication using the Apache Jakarta Catalina JDBC Realm on top of Tomcat 4.0 and using the 100% Java PointBase SQL database.  Designed the relationship between the Catalina user roles and priviledges and the application's user roles.

 

Chief Technology Officer, eKnowlogie. Minneapolis, MN,  www.eknowlogie.com

January 1998 - Present

 

• Designer, Architect and Lead Developer, the ColdFusion to J2EE Migrator.  Sole designer and lead developer (in a two-member development team) of the ColdFusion to J2EE Migrator, a software transformation and refactoring tool to automatically migrate ColdFusion web applications to Java J2EE (including ColdFusion 5.0 and MX).  The Migrator will re-architect the original monolithic ColdFusion application into a modular Model-View-Controller application framework using Struts and JSP.  This re-architecturization separates the business logic from the presentation logic.  The business logic is translated to back-end Java and Struts, and modularized into reusable components (Java classes and methods) while the presentation logic is translated to thin stateless JSP.  Enterprise-wide type inference analysis is applied in order to translate dynamic ColdFusion variables to explicitly-declared, properly-encapsulated Java-style variables.  A metalanguage processor was built to automatically generate visitors for BNF-specified trees, using the Visitor EST design pattern devised by this author.  These visitors are used to analyze and transform source code. Release 2.0 of this translator consisted of 104 packages (including 23 nesting packages), 898 Java classes and 192,450 lines of Java source code.  Languages and Platforms Used: Java 2.0, JavaCC, Java Tree Builder, J2EE, JDBC, JSP, XML, Apache Tomcat 5.0, BEA Weblogic, IBM WebSphere, Eclipse 3.0, CVS, JBuilder, UML, Visual Paradigm for UML, ColdFusion.

 

 

Chief Executive Officer, Xinotech Research, Inc. Minneapolis, MN

February 1993- December 1999

• Corporate. Xinotech Research’s corporate mission was to design, develop and commercialize metalanguage-based tools for the automatic transformation, modernization and documentation of large-scale legacy software applications.  Developed and presented business plans to the investment community, secured multiple sources of private funding through investment and partnerships.  Secured investment loans from the State of Minnesota (sole selection among 33 other companies).  Created subsidiaries in Paris, France and Helsinki, Finland.  Gave over 500 customer presentations in the U.S. and Europe.  Managed a budget of several millions of dollars per year.  Proposed, negotiated and executed the sale of Xinotech's  Jovial to C automatic transformation technology to the U.S. Air Force which they selected as their standard for the automatic migration and modernization of their embedded F-16 software systems.
• Strategic Alliances.  Developed and negotiated strategic alliances for the distribution of Xinotech technologies with organizations in the USA and Europe, including Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, IBM (Santa Teresa), Hewlett Packard, Micro Focus (England), and IT service providers in France, Finland, Norway, Greece and Spain.
• Marketing. Developed a multi-tier marketing strategy for the Xinotech product line based on strategic alliances, distribution, agency, referral, mass and direct marketing.  Developed marketing materials for multiple audiences and in multiple formats (web site, videos, multi-media, brochures, ads, demonstrations). Created the Strategic Alliance Program and drafted all the inter-related legal agreements (distribution, agency, referral, license, factory, tech-support, maintenance).  Selected and interacted with lawyers in the US and Europe to support the legal framework.
• Customers.  Established sales channels for the Xinotech Year 2000 tools in the IT market as well as for the Xinotech Ada and Jovial tools in the aerospace market.  The Xinotech Year 2000 and Euro refactoring tools were used by the largest organizations in the world, including France Telecom, AXA (the largest insurance company in the world, which owns the Equitable in the USA), Tieto-Enator (the largest IT consulting company in Europe, based in Scandinavia).  The Xinotech aerospace software refactoring tools are used by the largest aerospace companies in the USA including Lockheed-Martin, Rockwell, the Air Force Research Labs, the Army and the Navy.

 

 

Chief Technology Officer, Xinotech Research, Inc. Minneapolis, MN

February 1987 – December 1998

• Automatic Software Transformation and Refactoring Technology Development. Sole designer and co-developer of the Xinotech Knowledge Abstractor IDE for Automatic Software Transformation.  This language-independent environment was designed as a customizable architecture of 4.5 million lines, consisting of four metalanguage layers: XinoML for abstract grammar and concrete syntax manipulation, XSSL for incremental attribute-grammar semantic evaluation, XPAL for declarative, domain-specific constraint-based abstraction and transformation, and Typel for object prospecting, abstraction and transformation.  This technology was used by the IT industry for the processing of 75 million lines of COBOL source code for Year 2000 correction, Euro currency software refactoring and the automatic generation of documentation web sites. This IDE introduced software visualization and software construction capabilities not present then in development environments for UML and Java.  With this technology framework, Xinotech produced for the U.S. Air Force and Lockheed-Martin, the only successful and commercially-viable technology for the automatic transformation and modernization of the embedded real-time Jovial software systems used in the F-16, F-117 airplanes and other aircraft.  Such transformation environment was selected and adopted nationally by the Air Force as the standard for the automatic modernization of its embedded avionics systems (see the Air Force & Lockheed Martin article in the Journal of Defense Software Engineering at http://www.crosstalkonline.org/storage/issue-archives/2001/200112/200112-Littlejohn.pdf). 
• Strategic consultant to the IT industry.  Provided strategic recommendations for technology modernization of IT organizations.
• Principal Investigator for 20 National Research Contract Awards.  Was awarded over 15 research contracts as Principal Investigator from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), Edwards AFB, Army, AFRL and others.  Solely responsible for conceiving, writing, submitting and presenting these proposals and results to these organizations. Gave presentations at several DARPA-sponsored national conferences and others.
• Technical Support Program.  Developed technical content and presentation materials for the Xinotech seminar and training programs, which were taught across the US and Europe.  Wrote and published over 800 pages of user manuals to support the Xinotech product line.  Taught week-long software design and refactoring seminars to organizations across the world, including the global Year 2000 project directorate of Hewlett-Packard’s  TMO Division, EDS, NASA, Air Force Research Labs, Tieto Corporation in Finland, SITEC in Greece.
• Staff Management. Selected and managed a technical staff of up to 15 key individuals, brought to the company from within the U.S. as well as from Norway, Denmark and Australia.  In the early incubation period of this company, Mr. Rivera’s leadership motivated a core development team to stay on for an 8-month salary hiatus until a subsequent venture capital round.  The technology developed under his management was perceived by the industry to have required a staff of 5 to 10 times the actual size.

 

Consultant, Computer Networks, University of Minnesota, Sociology Department and CLA, Minneapolis, MN,

September 1985 - December 1986

• Network consultant for a project to study and analyze behavior response under abnormal conditions.  This model was implemented on top of a local area network using the network architecture previously developed by this Consultant which provided programmatic support for remote method invocation in Pascal.  Designed and built a dedicated database management system in Pascal for the CLA interactive budget management.

 

Research Assistant, University of Minnesota, Special Interactive Computers Laboratory, Minneapolis, MN,

April 1983 - September 1985

• While a Ph.D. Candidate, designed and implemented a transparent, seamless extension for Pascal to support remote method invocation in a local area network.  This facility would allow programmers to share resources and synchronize events over the network through standard Pascal programming. This facility was implemented as a hierarchy of API’s available at the virtual machine, the Pascal language, and the operating system command language levels.
• Designed and implemented a graphics package for analysis of three-dimensional representations of objects to be used in a mechanical engineering drawing course.
• Provided microcomputer support throughout the University and taught several minicourses in this area.

 

 

PUBLICATIONS

 

           [Rivera 12]      R. Rivera.  Aggregation and Classification with Hadoop and HBase, September 2012.                                      See http://www.eknowlogie.com/Papers/AggregationWithHadoopHBase.pdf

[Rivera 02]                   R. Rivera. Ultra-light Reusable Presentation Components with JSP. EK 02-0122 Technical Publication, Jan 22, 2002.  This paper presents an ultra-light framework to support reusable components in JSP.  See http://www.eknowlogie.com/aliorsum/

 

[Rivera 01]               R. Rivera. A Java Design Pattern with UML: Visitor for Specializable Composition. EK 01-0501 Technical Publication, May 1, 2001.  This pattern supports both generic and specialized visitation for trees that are subclassed through increasing layers of specialization.  This pattern was used by the author to write a software refactoring environment and a generic source-code formatter or pretty-printer which can format Java, C, or XML programs without having to specialize the formatter for those languages.  See http://www.eknowlogie.com/Papers/VisitorSC/.

 

[Rivera 01]                  R. Rivera. A Java GUI Design Pattern: Object-Centric GUI Hieararchy. EK 01-0404 Technical Publication, April  4, 2001.

 

[Rivera 00]                 R. Rivera. A Java GUI Design Pattern: Footprint for Decoupling GUI Artifacts From Their Layouts. EK 00-0420 Technical Publication, April  20, 2001.

 

[Rivera 98]                R. Rivera. Typel, the Type Prospecting and Evolution Language. XRI 98-0504 Technical Publication, May 4, 1998.

 

[Rivera 94]                   R. Rivera. Knowledge-Based, Metalanguage-Based Object Abstraction for Automatic Program Transformation. Proceedings of the Fourth Systems Reengineering Technology Workshop, NSWC.  John Hopkins University APL Research Center Report RMI-94-003, Monterey CA, February, 1994. See www.eknowlogie.com/Papers/ObjAbs.pdf.

 

 

RESEARCH CONTRACT AWARDS

 

Has been awarded, as sole Principal Investigator, over 15 research contracts from well-known national research organizations, including the following:

[DARPA 95-40]                Software Evolution by Component Clasification and Unification.  Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s EDCS BAA Program (Evolutionary Design of Complex Software), three year contract.

 

[AF 94-245]               Automatic Reengineering Into C  and  Object-Orientation Into C++.  Edwards Air Force Base, three-year contract (2 awards).

 

[NSF 94-16a]               Object-Orientation of C and COBOL Programs for Increased Reusability and Maintenance.  National Science Foundation, one-year contract.

 

[DARPA 93-11]                The Xinotech Object Abstractor for Automated Software Transformation. DARPA BAA, three-year contract (3 awards).

 

[AJPO 93]               Automatic Reengineering of Ada 83 into Object-Oriented Ada 95.  Ada Joint (Army, Navy, Air Force) Program Office, two-year contract.

 

[DARPA 93-041] The Xinotech PSDL Environment for the Visualization of Real-Time Software Specifications.  DARPA one-year contract.

 

[DARPA 91-209] Formal Specification of the Xinotech Object Abstraction Tools for Ada Reengineering.  DARPA one-year contract.

 

[DARPA 91-208] The Xinotech Translation Environment from Other Languages Into Ada.  DARPA one-year contract.

 

[Navy N90-274]                The Xinotech Graphical Programming Environment to Support Software Reusability.  Navy NraD/SPAWAR three-year contract.  Single-selection by Navy among 24 competing companies.

 

[Navy N89-149]                Language-Independent Semantic Analysis and Abstraction-Based Translation for a  Software Refactoring Environment.  Navy NSWC three-year contract  (2 awards).

 

[Navy N89-001]               A Metalanguage for an Integrated Programming Environment.  Navy ONR one-year contract.

 

 

 

PERSONAL

 

Citizenship: USA.

Languages: English, Spanish.