About
Rob is a member of the Intelligent Computing Research Team within the Computational Data Analytics Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In his role as a research professional, works alongside domain scientists to deliver solutions to complex problems at a national scale. His current research interests include large-scale text analysis, scientific uses of cloud computing, cyber security, and machine learning. At the end of the day, he is a computer nerd who thinks it is cool to work at the home of supercomputing within the US and where they have instruments called "the Spallation Neutron Source".
Prior to coming to ORNL 5 years ago, Rob was as a solutions architect for a high-end consulting firm where his work included business and systems analysis, provisioning infrastructures for federal, corporate and service provider environments and general application development. He has many years of experience as a professional developer with clients ranging from service providers in Europe and Japan to corporate and federal customers in the US including spending time as a adjunct member of a Microsoft solutions development team.
Professional Profile
Text Analysis Workbench for Forensic Investigations
Principle investigator for a project that represents a fusion of a number of tools developed by our group. Toolset includes advanced text extraction, entity extraction, machine translation, document clustering and other analysis tools. Software and hardware are packaged in both a server/data-center platform as well as a fly-kit designed to support 5 analysts in a stand-alone field environment.
Machine Learning Platform for Network Intrusion Detection
Member of a team developing a machine-learning based approach to detecting anomolous network traffic. This platform has been implemented and tested in a number of environments and has proven quite effective. Currently working on taking the research prototype into an operationally-sustainable model.
Algorithm and Approach for Dymnamically Scaling Large Memory-Resident Graphs in the Cloud
As part of a team working to scale a document clustering algorithm to process 100's of millions of documents, developed a patent-pending approach to take massive memory-resident graphs and scale them "infinitely" across a cloud-computing platform while maintaining the resiliency and fault-tolerance that people expect in cloud computing environments.
Applicability of Cloud Computing and Scientific (HPC) Computing
Co-PI on a mutli-year project assessing issues with, and addressing obstacles in using cloud computing technologies in the scientific or technical computing arena. Worked with other computational researchers to understand current obstacles and to apply cloud computing principles as solutions. Specific focus applied in the climate, computational biology, and geographic information systems areas. Coordinated relationships with commercial vendors with the objective of improving public infrastructure in support of scientific computing. Working on developing new and novel approaches to transferring data as well as applying existing algorithms to new computational paradigms.
Application Security and Cyber Security Analysis
Worked on a team to coordinate the hardening of a handful of critical applications from a cyber-security perspective. Also worked performing basic penetration testing employing both technical and social engineering techniques to validate that stated measures were, in fact, efficacious.
Deployment of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (VSTFS)
Oversaw the installation of the tools, performed the configuration, and provided training to key personnel on the proper usage of the platform. Leveraged existing experience delivering software applications for clients around the world as well as participation on Microsoft development teams to adapt the tools to the customer’s needs.
Custom Application Rewrite
Provided team leadership, solutions architecture and development support for a rewrite of an old application and applied new Microsoft platform tools including things such as SSIS, SSRS, Visual Studio, custom SharePoint web parts, Click-Once technology for application deployment. Worked closely with application owners to adapt and design a rewrite that met the needs of the client.
Technical Leadership on Advanced Project Team
While embedded with the team, provided daily assistance to the other developers with respect to how to properly utilize the Microsoft development tools to accomplish their tasks. This “mentorship” was provided via direct one-on-one instruction; team training exercises, brown-bags, and actual development of code that could be used in the project but also serve as sample code for the others.
Develop Pilot Project Supporting Platform Modernization Efforts
Worked with CIO of 4000-person company to develop a series of pilot projects demonstrating various ways to apply Microsoft technologies to their business needs. This included applications that integrated business data and geospatial data as well as applications that illustrated custom workflow solutions.
Custom Application Analysis and Smart Client Development
Worked with a federal agency in Washington, D.C. that was experiencing significant performance problems with a custom-built application that supported their core business. Provided code analysis, and performance suggestions, as well as providing sample code and pilot project of an application with significantly improved performance both for the web application as well as providing an easy-to-deploy smart client.
Lead Developer for Microsoft Provisioning Solutions
Worked for two years as a member of a Microsoft development team supporting their provisioning solutions for Windows-based Hosting and Exchange hosting. This included sitting on the architecture review board, designing components, authoring code, performing code reviews, delivering training on the platform and tools to others both internally and externally to Microsoft.
Provisioning System Design and Team Training – Zurich, Switzerland
Provided support to the development team of a service provider that was switching to MAPS (an older Microsoft provisioning platform) to MPS. Worked hand-in-hand to train the development team, work through the integration with their account management and billing system, and to deliver tools that would support the documentation and maintenance of their provisioning and service delivery infrastructure.
Provisioning System Solution Architecture and Deployment Support – Rome, Italy
Provided infrastructure guidance, provisioning code analysis, and production roll support for the deployment of a Windows-based hosting environment for the largest telco in Italy. Worked in conjunction with other industry leaders such as Microsoft, Avanade, Accenture and others to deliver a team-based approach to solving complex mobile delivery scenarios.
Provisioning System Solution Architecture – Amsterdam, NL
Supported the local Microsoft office by working on their behalf to provide architecture and development approach support for a large telco deploying Hosted Exchange services. Activities included tasks such as provisioning infrastructure design, integration with existing systems, general programming instruction and support.
Provisioning System Development and Platform Design – Nottingham, England
Worked with a large hoster in the UK to deliver an automated provisioning platform for their Windows-based (Web/Data) hosting offering. Activities included infrastructure design and consultation, custom developed extensions to Microsoft’s provisioning platform, developing a custom control panel, integration with third-party systems such as a Linux-hosted mail and billing systems.
Provisioning Solution Architecture – Germany
Supported the local Microsoft office in their working with one of the largest hosting companies in Germany to develop a provisioning solution that implemented SOA principles and scaled to support thousands of new customers daily.
Identity Management and Hosting Solution
Worked with a large hosting company to help them implement an MIIS addition to their dedicated outsourced Exchange offering. Prior to our involvement, they were synchronizing the customer’s AD forest with the hosted AD forest each night via a series of VB scripts, LDIFDE exports and imports, and other custom code resulting in a tenuous synchronization environment. We helped them implement MIIS as a replacement for the custom code allowing for full bi-directional synchronization.
Centralized Exchange Provisioning/Synchronization (EAF & MIIS)
Performed work for a US government agency in Washington DC helping them automate the provisioning of accounts in a centralized Exchange environment. Their model was a centralized AD forest that would host mail for all of their sub organizations; however their sub organizations were completely disconnected and managed their own forests (there is a one-way non-transitive trust such that the security principles in the sub-org forests were trusted by the “core” Exchange forest. Designed a solution using Microsoft’s Identity Integration Server (MIIS) to monitor the remote forests, and automatically trigger the provisioning of a mailbox and external reference account settings in the centralized forest. Also configured/customized the de-provisoning process (also triggered automatically by changes to the object in the remote AD environments). Finally, used MIIS to integrate with an external system responsible for assignment of “business card” email addresses (i.e. public address) ensuring that the GAL was updated properly with the addresses generated by this system.
Custom Corporate Provisioning Solution
Worked side-by-side with Microsoft Consulting Services to provide a solution for a large corporate environment (120K+ AD objects) that included integrating with MMS (pre-cursor to MIIS), a custom provisioning solution, contractor management, etc. Also featured an approval process for new accounts supporting both self-signup, and auto-expiration/rolloff of contractor accounts).
MPF Developer Toolkit
Built an integrated development environment for designing, building, and testing MPF namespaces, named procedures, and requests. This tool features the unification of a series of command-line tools and other utilities into a unified graphical environment including an XML editor with full Intellisense-like support. This tool was adapted and distributed as a tool by Microsoft to its hosting customers
Analysis of Provisioning Platforms
Performed an in-depth analysis of various provisioning platforms provided by Microsoft. The products included in this effort were the Microsoft Provisioning System, Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 and Microsoft Identity Integration Server. A detailed report was developed to provide a listing of the provisioning capabilities of each system, the relative strengths and weaknesses of each platform, and an assessment of the various scenarios in which each might play a role in solving customer problems
Microsoft Solution for Windows Based Hosting including Hosted Exchange
Functioned as a key developer in building extensions to the Microsoft Provisioning System to support the extensions from the Microsoft Solution for Windows Based Hosting to include the functional requirements of the Hosted Exchange offerings. This work included leading a team responsible for the development of a DNS provider for Windows Server 2003 that used WMI in .NET as well as use of .NET remoting tools. Also responsible for building tools focused on analyzing a network environment and properly configuring the entire environment for Hosted Exchange. During this phase of the project, extended the .NET base class built in the previous project to include a custom project type for Visual Studio .NET. Extended Visual Studio .NET to provide Intellisense capabilities during the development of MPF Named Procedures and requests.
Microsoft Solution for Windows Based Hosting
Functioned as a key developer in building extensions to the Microsoft Provisioning System to support the functionality desired by CMSU in the Microsoft Solution for Windows Based Hosting. This work included building a base class providing the interop layer between MPF (traditional COM) and the .NET framework allowing developers at Microsoft and around the world to extend MPF using any .NET-supported language. Built a SQL administration provider exposing hosting functionality to the provisioning framework. Built a series of XML web services that exposed the functionality in the MPF namespaces to the .NET framework. This effort included specific web services targeted at individual operations as well as a generic web service designed to support run-time integration of new named procedures.
Microsoft Provisioning System, Web Management Console
Principle developer on the Web Console portion of the Microsoft Provisioning System. MPS is a complete framework for provisioning various Microsoft and non-Microsoft services. The web console, in conjunction with the managed namespaces (also a part of MPS), is a sample interface provided as an example of how to use the framework, and can serve as a production tool, or as a basis for ISVs to develop their own interface. Participated as a member of a Microsoft development team and helped them bring a solution to market. This project involved the following items:
Custom Provisioning Solution
Worked with the Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) office located in Tokyo, Japan to deliver a custom provisioning solution to one of the largest ISP/ASPs in Japan. This solution was based on the MAPS 4.0 engine, and included extending the engine to encompass IIS provisioning (complete with FrontPage Server Extensions) as well as DNS provisioning. Part of this project included onsite training of the client, as well as Tokyo-based ISV who was responsible for developing the user interface to sit on top of the solution we provided.
Education
- Bob Jones University – Bachelor of Science in Broadcast Engineering,
- Minor in Computer Science
Certifications
- Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer
- Cisco Certified Network Associate
Awards
- Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP)
- Windows Azure 2010
- Windows Azure 2011
Presentations and Talks
