Technical Group Supervisor, Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
California Institute of Technology 4/10/00 through present. The
Parallel Applications Technology group resides in the Exploration
Systems Autonomy Section.
Lecturer Electrical Engineering Department,
California Institute of Technology 1-99 through 3-99. Second quarter
Information Theory course.
Member of the Technical Staff, Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
California Institute of Technology 1-20-92 through present. In the
Communications Research Section and the Information Processing Group.
Duties have included:
- Work with the Advanced Laboratory for Parallel
High-Performance Applications. Goals for the group include:
parallel scalable
applications which can be run on different supercomputing
platforms. Projects include:
- Virtual Observatory
which is producing Digital Sky visualization tools for the SGI Power Onyx.
Powerful tools are needed for visualization of astronomical data because
of the large numbers and the size of images. (Can you say billions and
billions of objects?) Implemented a feature to allow a user to shift an
image to a specified coordinate and tools to manipulate catalog information
inpreparation for colored and shaped symbols to be drawn at the correct
locations on the image.
- Synthetic
Aperture Radar (SAR) processing for interferometry which will run on:
Cray T3D, Cray T3E, Origin 2000, SGI Power Onyx, Sun Ultra,
Hewlett-Packard Exemplar, and IBM SP2. The target here is to
demonstrate steady processing of data into images and interferograms
where the data may be stored and viewed across the country from the
processors.
- Synthetic forces modeling running on IBM
SP2s and Origin 2000s. Success was acheived with simultaneous use of
several supercomputers networked together for simulation of tens of
thousands of forces. [1],[2],
and [3]
- The protocol for command transmissions to deep
space probes and satellites, as described in the Consultative
Committee on Space Data Standards Green and Blue books, specifies a
transmission unit consisting of a start sequence, codewords containing
data and using error correction, and a tail sequence to flag the end
of the unit. We identified a better tail sequence for this
Telecommand Channel; this new sequence has been included in the
recently revised Telecommand Standards. [13]
- Developed a software tool to soft-decision
maximum-likelihood decode block codes up to length 64 using the
artificial intelligence graph search algorithm known as A* which has
been applied to block decoding by Han, Et. Al. at Syracuse
University. [4], [10]
- Monitored a JPL contract to study the future role
of satellites in personal communications with the Pacific Advanced
Communications Consortium.
- Looked at ways of reducing the search for
permutations of a block code that will produce minimal optimal
trellises for Viterbi decoding. [5], [7], [8], [9].
- Analyzed the behavior of Integer Cosine Transform
compression ratios and mean squared errors for the Galileo S-Band
Contingency Mission; the goal is to provide the Project with the tools
to predict and bound the error on the compression to be acheived by
Galileo on the images to be transmitted to Earth.[11]
Postdoctoral Scholar in Electrical Engineering, Stanford
University, fall quarter 1991. Faculty Sponsor: Prof. Thomas
M. Cover.
Research Asssistent for Prof. Thomas M. Cover, Stanford
University. 1/88 through 9/91. Thesis title: Process Entropy. [15]
- Pursued research topics in information theory and
communication theory with specific contributions to the entropy of a
stopped sequence, Huffman codes, and competitive optimality of Huffman
codes. [12], [14]
Teaching Assistant for Prof. Gene F. Franklin and Robert
M. Gray, Stanford University. 9/88 through 6/89.
- Courses in Control Theory, Digital Control, and
Fourier Analysis.
Research Assistant for Prof. Joseph W. Goodman, Stanford
University. 9/87 through 6/88. Optical interconnects and optical
computing problems.
- Developed a simulation to determine transfer
function characteristics of coaxial cable as a function of length and
bandwidth, including skin effects.
Summer intern at General Motors Corporation; Delco Systems
Operations, Goleta, CA. Summer 1985.
- Provided hardware engineering support and
developed test software for interfacing a serial bus to an IBM PC.
Co-op student at Raytheon Electromagnetic Systems
Division, Goleta, CA. Summer 1984 and Summer 1983.
- During 1984, developed a prototype expert system
using OPS-5 and LISP. [16]
- During 1983, duties included documentation of a
Fortran computer simulation.
Teaching Assistant at University of California, Santa
Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA. 1/83-6/83.
- Tutored students in the self-paced calculus,
trigonometry and algebra courses.