Kenneth "Wyvern" Aldinger
wyvern@dracat.net
425-891-2522


[*Skills*]

Distributed Systems
Operations
Machine Learning
Information Retrieval
Graphics

Programming:  C++, Python, Java


[*Employment*]

2005 - Present, Google, Inc.
Senior Software Engineer
Projects included:
  -  Google Maps; realtime road traffic: data acquisition, processing, and serving
  -  internal 6-month "internship" in operations
  -  Google Sitemaps and Webmaster Tools: tech lead of infrastructure and back-end team
Education outreach projects included:
  -  Advised senior project team at University of Washington in distributed systems
  -  Guest lectured at University of Washington on MapReduce
  -  Liaison to research team at Tecnolgico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico

2000 - 2005, Microsoft Corp.
Software Design Engineer
Projects included:
  -  MSN Messenger, multiple versions
  -  MSN Premium and Plus clients, multiple versions
  -  Various unreleased ".Net" projects

1999, Microsoft Corp.
Intern
Drove changes to a metadata pre-standard called the Open Information Model.

1998, WRQ Inc.
Intern
Authored competitive analysis reports for software products

1994 - 1997, Wyoming Sweetwater County School District #2
Assistant to the IT Director
Acted as WAN Admin for an 11-site network.
Guest instructed at a training camp for bringing Internet connectivity to rural environments.



[*Education*]

2001 - 2002, University of Washington Education Outreach
Certificate in Game Development

1996 - 2000, University of Washington
Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering
Graduated cum laude, with a 3.73 GPA.
Co-authored a paper published at SIGGraph 2000.
Completed senior project courses in animation and digital hardware.



[*Accomplishments*]

Varied accomplishments through professional career.  Highlights include:

(Google)

2009  -  Invented an extension on the common A-Star route solving algorithm to use prior routes to assist solving new routes in less time.  Deploying this algorithm reduced latency of realtime road traffic pipeline by 40%.

2008  -  Designed and implemented a feed processing system able to auto-determine the structure of XML documents.  Using this system, new regional data feeds could be integrated into the realtime road traffic pipeline with a few minutes of configuration.

2007-09  -  Developed a data storage layer for tracking and monitoring periodic processing.  In use by dozens of Google properties, including Doubleclick, Google Analytics, Google Maps, and others.

2007  -  Developed a shim layer to assist load balancers in correctly handling services that use long-hanging connections.  In use by several Google properties, including Android, Google Earth, and Google Talk.


(Microsoft)

2005  -  Demonstrated 3D DirectX rendered objects on the desktop, outside of any visible window.  At the time various DirectX engineers referred to this as impossible.

2005  -  Developed a heuristic lexical tokenizer for use with arbitrary international text, including non-space-delimited text.

2003-04  -  Sole developer for the adaptive antispam e-mail filter in several versions of MSN clients.  Developed the first working antispam filter Microsoft ever shipped in a product.

2001  -  Invented a red-eye detection and correction algorithm.


(Independent)

2001  -  Created a recovery solution and successfully recovered data from corrupt GZip archives, in defiance of GZip's author referring to the project as impossible.


(University of Washington)

2000  -  Co-authored "Surface Light Fields for 3D Photography", published in conference proceedings of ACM SIGGraph 2000.

2000  -  Co-designed and implemented a Win32 service for a distributed rendering of Maya animations.

1999  -  Designed and built motion-capture hardware.