Joseph Decker
1733 Hudson Drive
San Jose, California
95124-1737
+1 408 266 2736
decker@alumni.caltech.edu
B.S. Mathematics, Caltech, 1984
| 1997-2003 | Liberate Technologies (formerly NCI, formerly Navio Communications) |
A primary developer of Liberate TV Navigator Standard, an Internet-standards-based platform for delivering interactive applications, web content, and enhanced television services to customers of cable operators, etc. With TV Navigator, cable operators write profitable applications (such as VOD-ordering) primarily in HTML, JavaScript, Java, etc., which substantially reduces their developments costs and risks, replacing multiyear development cycles with several-month development cycles. This product is now deployed in a few million homes across several different cable systems, primarily in Europe. TV Navigator product development effort started with my hiring, grew eventually to a team of a couple dozen, and has been for the last few years Liberate's largest source of revenue. Worked across all areas of the client software and several areas of our server software. Worked with set-top manufacturers, tool providers and customers to make the product work well for our customers. Managed a group of developers working on multimedia extensions to the Liberate platform. Led the creation of a stability laboratory, which improved system MTBF by a factor of over 20 in a handful of weeks. Initiated and led a revamp of our porting strategy encompassing everything from relationship management to API work, slicing a third from the cost and time-to-market of new TV Navigator deployments. Development work primarily C and C++, bits of Java, also had quite a bit of exposure to HTML and JavaScript, since our product implements those standards.
| 1991-1997 | Synaptics |
Developed neural-network machine-print OCR software for a research contract for the USPS. Developed software and a netural network system for English handwriting (print) recognition that demonstrated half the error rate of competitive products at the time, while this software wasn't sold due to changes in the handwriting recognition market in 1996, much of that software was successfully reused in a Chinese handwriting recognition engine that Synaptics has had some success with. Developed neural network architecture and embedded software for a custom analog hardware OCR system to be used in point-of-sale terminal scanning wands, when hardware changes forced a system redesign, I invented new techniques retarget almost all the previous work to the newer low-precision digitial solution, saving months of work over the original redesign plan. Developed firmware for the Synaptics Touchpad, now the primary business of Synaptics.. Designed and conducted human-factors experiments on the usability and performance of pointing devices, measurably improving product performance and customer acceptance. Developed the Incomparable, Mysterious, Synaptics Moodpad, a touchpad-related toy that required little work but ended up driving additional press for Synaptics and served as the basis for a development kit for Touchpad application developers. Development work primarily C++, bits of i860 and PIC assembler.
| 1984-1991 | Franklin Electronic Publishers (formerly Proximity Technologies) |
Developed software used in most of Franklin’s handheld products during my tenure. In particular, I was a lead developer on the Franklin Spelling Ace, Franklin Language Master, and a line of handheld dictionaries. In total, these products have now over 20M units, and, as of 1999, many of the products were still shipping using code I developed. Developed numerous specialized techniques for compressing specific reference works (structured dictionary texts, lists of words with their conjugation information, small samples of recorded speech) while retaining the ability to search or otherwise use the compressed data on these small, embedded handhelds. This significantly reduced product cost in the Language Master and bilingual product lines. Managed a small group of developers and language experts in addition to my development duties. Development work primarily C, bits of various assembly languages.
6,430,305 Identity Verification Methods (Decker) 5,812,698 Handwriting System and Method (Platt, Nowlan, Matic, Decker) 5,321,609 Electronic Encyclopedia (Yianilos, Mayer, Decker) 5,229,936 Device and method for the storage and retrieval of inflection information for electronic reference products (Decker, Oswalt, Justice)
Platt, J., Decker, J. E, LeMoncheck, J. E., (1992), Convolutional Neural Networks for the Combined Segmentation and Recognition of Machine Printed Characters, Proc. 5th Advanced Technology Conference, USPS, 701-713.
I enjoy hiking and photography, these led me to start Rock Slide Photography, a small nature photography business.