Daniel N. Port

 

 

Education:

Ph.D. Applied Mathematics/Computer Science,  1994                                                   Massachusetts Institute of Technology

B.A. Mathematics, 1989                                                                                                      University of California Los Angeles

 

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

Model Based Architecture and Software Engineering (MBASE), Empirical Software Engineering, Component and Object Oriented Software Architecture, Mathematical Computer Science, Engineering of small and medium size systems, Casual event structures, Software Engineering Education

 

Applicable work experience:

Research Associate / Research Assistant Professor

Center for Software Engineering, University of Southern California                                                      1997-1998, 1999-Present

Responsibilities include graduate and undergraduate course development and instruction, DARPA, NSF, and NASA grant proposals, overseeing directed research for graduate students, provide basic research and development for CSE projects and activities, pursue individual research efforts of interest to CSE and CS department, prepare status reports on various projects and USC/DARPA activities, participate in DARPA workshops, support and improvement of software engi­neering courses (CS577a,b) particularly incorporation of Object Oriented methods and Rational products such as UML, Rose and Objectory process, provide general technical support where applicable. Some specific activities include associate instructor for graduate software engineering course CS577a (inclusive of lectures, grading, consulting, and evaluation), active participation in USC's DARPA-EDCS projects including WinWin and ACT-I integration and applications, WinWin API design and development, demo of CSE tools and research, integration of WinWin with CORBA based Catalyst system, oversight of student and technical development staff for various projects.

 

CTO and Founder

IPal, Inc.                                                                                                                                                                                2000-2001

Established operational and technology concepts, initial management and development team for internet software company. Invented taxonomy based matching concept and key proprietary algorithms and data structures for primary match engine component. Led initial rapid product design and development efforts, hired technical and business development staff, strategic planning, and business models. Managed initial technical development team and led in obtaining $1M first round (Zone Ventures) and $2.5M second round (Nextream Ventures) financing.  Responsible for overall technical direction and strategic sales, applications, and partnerships.

 

Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Science, Columbia University                                                                                             1998-1999

Preparation and presentation of undergraduate and graduate computer science courses. Managed team of 9 TA’s in implementing all aspects of the project based graduate and undergraduate Software Engineering courses (CS3156, CS4156). Developed new course curriculum based on current software engineering research and practice (MBASE) utilizing “real” customers and projects. Performed academic service such as serving on master admissions committee, PhD committee, etc. Originated NSF research proposals with Gail Kaiser for NSF GPG (CISE) Software Engineering program on application of the opensource development paradigm to small systems engineering through work group cache and structured models, and CISE and CRCD funding programs to develop and disseminate software engineering course materials and extend and infuse current software engineering research. Coordinated joint research and funding efforts with Barry Boehm at the University of Southern California, including NSF Experimental Systems program for agent based rapid application development decision assistants. Goal is to establish a internationally distinguished small systems software engineering research and education presence for Columbia University. Wrote proposal for NT Lab (over 50 machines and multiple software packages) accepted by Microsoft. Established Columbia as a major software engineering education site for Rational Inc. (included extensive donation of software and educational materials). Created project customer relationships with the Columbia Teachers College, Columbia Business School, Butler Library, Barnard Library, Chemistry Department, Biomedical Imaging, Dean of Engineering School, CVN, Music Library, as well as several industrial customers outside Columbia such as WebTV and InterSolv.

 

Director of Technology / Lead Architect

Techtactics, Inc.                                                                                                                                                                   1996-1999

Co-founded small, highly technical consulting company  focused on empowering development teams to successfully transition to component/object based development . Through training in component/object based software engineering and direct mentoring of projects, development teams are transformed into highly skilled domain specific system architects via the ISDM process. Techtactics has successfully migrated two teams within Hughes Space and Communication towards development of Java based satellite ground control systems. Highlights include rapid domain knowledge acquisition from new staff, dramatically increased effectiveness in working with project stakeholders outside  the team (in particular the satellite ground systems domain experts and outside software/hardware vendors), and elegant integration of software designs with mandated hardware systems  and legacy software. Other success stories include business focus, feasibility, and architectural design (along with some implementation) of a sophisticated, RDBMS based internet “audio browser” for Digitoy, Inc. Techtactics also provides technical feasibility studies for software/hardware concepts  as (primarily for product assessment for venture funding) as well as project status assessment.

 

Lecturer                                                                                                                                                                                1996-1997

Computer Science Department, University of Southern California

Instructor for CS599 special topics in computer science. Responsible for the course materials and instruction of a graduate soft­ware engineering course on the analysis, design, and construction of large scale integrated systems. Course material is based on the theory and practice of Integrated Systems Development Methodology (ISDM). The course uses Java as an example integra­tion language to design an integrated communication framework for a university intranet.

 

Director of Technology / Senior Research Scientist                                                                                                   1996-1997

EC2 at the Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California

Responsibilities include, acting as technical director for all operations for entrepreneurial/multimedia development center at USC, including design, implementation and maintenance of a network based WAN/LAN testbed facility; designed and built initial fundamental infrastructure including, client and server hardware, Intra/Internet, physical and logical networks and ISP services, etc.; developed and trained systems integration and OOAD methodologies, as well as implementing large scale high profile client-server applications (e.g. digital asset management system, Java Intranet framework, integrated testbed); recruiting, managing, and training full-time tech­nical staff and student interns; interfacing with University departments (ISI, IMSC, CNTV) as well as corporate members such as Sun, Apple, Xerox; providing technical consulting for business incubator selection committee as well as incubator tenants and an affiliated venture capital fund. Responsible for maintaining an independent research initiative to provide world-class, leading edge visibility and direction to the project; all research translated into successful projects. Research initiatives included digital asset management (including back-end royalty accounting), multi­media production process, integrated systems development methodology, design and construction of integrated intranets. Spoke at several conferences and organizations such as Auspex Systems Technical seminars. See http://www.ec2.edu/EC2

 

Developer Trainer/OLS Project Leader.

NeXT Computer, Inc.                                                                                                                                                          1994-1996

Instructor for open enrollment courses, on-sites, and custom OLS customers such as Disney, Koch Industries, and McCaw Cel­lular. Implemented and evolved training programs for NeXT, including OOAD, EOF (for Sybase, Oracle, Informix) , SysAd­min, OPENSTEP, PDO/Distributed Systems, Web-Objects and other object oriented development areas. Wrote two and three tier client server applications for training courses and internal department use, provided analysis and design developer support for high profile customers. Worked with NeXT development engineers to evolve and improve development environment based on OLS experiences.

 

Director/Owner

Pixelated Technologies, Cube Route Inc.                                                                                                                      1991-1994

Handled all sales and marketing; designed and built several software applications such as an object based English grammar check service, Class 2 FAX driver, and NIST time service, SCSI formatting/optimization utility, and integrated telecommunications application “Voila”. Consulted on many projects, such as a "Statistics Toolbox" for the Matlab software at the MathWorks, Inc., and a vessel container management software for Trans Pacific Container Corporation (built on top of Sybase). Consulted for many other (short term) clients, including NeXT Inc., Whitelight systems Inc, Cambridge Animation Systems. (Listings and references available upon request). Designed, built and marketed several hardware products, including a low cost telecommunications interface and external 2.88MB floppy drive for the NeXT comput­ers. Hired and managed four employees in areas of sales, office management, and software development.

 

Teaching Assistant

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.                                                                                                                          1993

Recitation instructor for undergraduate courses such as differential equations, combinatorics, and probability and statistics; pro­vided individual and group student support; participated in creation, facilitation, and grading of exams; involved in grading eval­uating students final course grades and improvements for future courses.

 

Systems Analyst

University of California Los Angeles, Department of Mathematics                                          1986-1989

Responsibilities included expanding and maintaining a heterogeneous network (mostly physical Ether and serial based networks), assisting users, security. Testing and installation of new hardware such as printers, monitors, and plotters. Designed custom diagnostic and installation tools, in particular a tool for diagnosing wire sequence errors, breaks, and shorts for very long serial lines.

 

Technology Experience:

•       Platforms: NeXT, SUN, HP, SGI, DEC Alpha, Auspex, Macintosh, PC.

•       Programming languages: Java, ObjC, C, C++, SQL, Fortran, 68000 series Assembly, Pascal, Forth, Lisp, Smalltalk, Post­Script, BASIC, APL. (Scripting languages:) Perl, [c]sh, matlab, sed, awk, tcl[tk], Javascript, HTML

•       Environments and specialization's: NeXTstep, UNIX (BSD, Linux, Mach), Microsoft products (WinNT, '95, etc.), system troubleshooting and administration, network design and construction, computer security

•       Knowledge of computer networking (TCP/IP, SNMP, etc.), distributed computing, cryptography, algorithms, numerical analysis, digital and analog circuits, electronics, amateur radio, technology training, technology consulting

•       Extensive knowledge of Software Development Methodologies - OOAD (OMT, Fusion, UML), E-R (RDBMS), ISO-9000-3, author of ISDM (Integrated Systems Development Methodology)

 

AWARDS, HONORS:

Departmental honors in mathematics (UCLA), Departmental Scholar in mathematics (UCLA), National Science Foundation Fellowship (1989‑1992), Chancellor's Marshal (UCLA), Technology Editor UCLA Undergraduate Science Journal

 

Security Clearance: Top-secret cryptography clearance obtained in 1994, currently inactive

 

PUBLICATIONS:

Software Engineering

1.        Boehm, Egyed, Port, Shah, Kwan, Madachy,  "A Stakeholder Win-Win Approach to Software Engineering Education", Annals of Software Engineering, April 1999, http://sunset.usc.edu/TechRpts/Papers/usccse98-511/usccse98-511.pdf

2.        Boehm, Port, “Escaping the Software Tar Pit: Model Clashes and How to Avoid Them”, International Conference on Requirements Engineering, June 1999.  http://sunset.usc.edu/TechRpts/Papers/usccse98-517/usccse98-517.pdf.

3.        Boehm, Port, "Conceptual Modeling Challenges for Model-Based Architecting and Software Engineering (MBASE)", to appear in Proceedings, Conceptual Modeling Symposium, http://sunset.usc.edu/TechRpts/Papers/usccse98-513/usccse98-513.pdf

4.        Boehm, Egyed, Kwan, Port, Shah, Madachy, "Using  the WinWin Spiral Model: A Case Study", IEEE Computer, July 1998, http://sunset.usc.edu/TechRpts/Papers/usccse98-512/usccse98-512.pdf

5.        Boehm, Abi-Antoun, Port, and Kwan, Lynch, “Requirements Engineering, Expectations Management, and the Two Cultures”,  International Conference on Requirements Engineering, June 1999. http://sunset.usc.edu/TechRpts/Papers/usccse98-518/usccse98-518.pdf

6.        Boehm, Port, Egyed, and Abi-Antoun, “The MBASE Life Cycle Architecture Milestone Package: No Architecture Is An Island”, World International Conference in Software Architectures, 1999, http://sunset.usc.edu/TechRpts/Papers/usccse98-510/usccse98-510.pdf

7.        Boehm, Port, “When Models Collide: Lesson From Software Systems Analysis”, IT Professional, IEEE-CS, Janurary/February  1999, pp. 49-56

8.        Port, Park, “Enabling Distributed Collaboration of Priorities”, Proceedings of 6th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC'99), pp.560-563, IEEE, Dec. 1999

9.        Park, Port and Boehm, “Supporting Distributed Collaborative Prioritization for WinWin Requirements Capture and Negotiations”, 3rd World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Vol. 2, pp. 578-584, IIIS, http://sunset.usc.edu/TechRpts/Papers/usccse99-516/usccse99-516.pdf.

10.     Boehm, Port, Abi-Antoun, and Egyed, "Guidelines for the Life Cycle Objectives  (LCO) and the Life Cycle Architecture (LCA) deliverables for Model-Based Architecting and Software Engineering (MBASE)", USC Technical Report USC-CSE-98-519, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, February 1999, http://sunset.usc.edu/TechRpts/Papers/usccse98-519/usccse98-519.pdf

11.   Port, Kaiser. “Collaborative Work: Collaborative Technologies for Evolving Software Systems”, IEEE Internet Computing, 2(6), November/December 1998.

12.   Port, McArthur, “A Study of Productivity and Efficiency for Object-Oriented Methods and Languages”, Proceedings of 6th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC'99), pp.560-563, IEEE, Dec. 1999

13.   Port, Dossick, “Extending UML Across The Complete Software Engineering Cycle”, 12th International Conference Software & Systems Engineering and their Applications,  December 1999

14.   Port, “Experiences Integrating Domain, Systems, and Requirements Engineering Within Software Engineering”, 12th International Conference Software & Systems Engineering and their Applications,  December 1999

15.   Port, Boehm “Using a Model Framework In Developing and Delivering a Family of Software Engineering Project Courses”, 14th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T),  February 2001(to appear)

16.   Boehm, Port “Educating Software Engineering Students to Manage Risk”, International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), March 2001(to appear)

17.   Bohm, Port, Al-Said “Avoiding the Software Model-Clash Spiderweb”, IEEE Computer, November 2000.

18.   Port, Dincel, Experiences Using Domain Specific Techniques within Multimedia Software Engineering, to appear in Annals of  Software Engineering, v12, p. 11-45, 2001

19.   Boehm, Brown, Huang, and Port, “Inverting the Software Process: Schedule, Cost, and Quality As Independent Variables”, submitted to ICSE 2002

20.   Port, Halling, Kazman, Biffl, “Strategic Quality Assurance Planning”, submitted to ICSE 2002

21.   Boehm, Port, Huang, and Brown, “Using the Spiral Model and MBASE to Generate New Acquisition Process Models: SAIV, CAIV, and SCQAIV”, Crosstalk January 2002 (to appear)

22.   Boehm, Port, “Introducing Risk Management Techniques Within Project Based Software Engineering Courses”, Computer Science Education V.x, (to appear)

23.   Al-Said, Port, “Requirements Are Not An Island”, Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Model-Based Requirements Engineering (to appear)

24.   Boehm, Port, “Balancing Discipline and Flexibility With the Spiral Model and MBASE” Crosstalk, December 2001

 

Software Engineering Workshops

25.     Port, “Design Patterns for Satellite Ground Control Systems”, Ground Station Architecture Workshop ‘98

26.     Port, “Unification of Components and Objects Through Formal Abstractions”, Component Based Software Engineering Workshop, Proceedings  ICSE98.

27.     Port, McArthur “COCOMO as Expert Baseline in Software Development Efficiency Metrics Across Heterogeneous Projects”, COCOMO Forum, October 1999

28.     Port, Boehm, “Risk Based Strategic Software Design: How Much COTS Evaluation is Enough?”,  Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Economics-Driven Software Engineering Research, ICSE 2001

 

Mathematical Computer Science

29.     Port, “Circular Numbers and n-set Partitions”, Journal of Combinatorial Theory - Series A 83, 57-78 (1998)

30.     Port, “A Characterization of Exponential and Ordinary Generating Functions”, Accepted to Journal of Combinatorial Theory

 

Books

31.     Differential Equations, Theory and Applications, (with Raymond Redheffer) Jones and Bartlett Publishers 1991

32.     Introduction to Differential Equations, (with Raymond Redheffer)  Jones and Bartlett Publishers 1992

33.     Integrated Systems Development Methodology, TELOS Press (forthcoming)

34.     Design and Construction of Integrated Intranets, TELOS Press (forthcoming)

 

Other Miscellaneous

35.     “Mathematical Games From Theorems”, UCLA Undergraduate Science Journal, 1985

36.     “Stochastic Simulation”, SIAM Reviews, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 324-349, June 1992

37.     “Choosing the Right Equipment” (with Dan Rabinovitch), LA Business Journal, 1995

 

Invited Lectures, Workshops, Program Committees:

Auspex Technical Forum, 1996

Program Committee California Software Symposium 1997

EDCS DARPA Workshop - UML and Software Architecture

USC CSE Focused Workshop on Rapid Application Development 1997 - RAD in Small Organizations

USC CSE Focused Workshop on Software Architectures 1997 - Object Oriented Architecture

USC CSE Focused Workshop 1998 – MBASE, DCPT

GSAW 1999 – Domain Specific Design Patterns for Ground Control Systems and Intranets

USC CSE Focused Workshop 1999 – MBASE, UML, Simplifiers and Complicators

ICSE2000 Host Committee

USC-CSE TUTORIAL July 27, 2000 - MBASE, CMMI, and Evolutionary/Spiral Development 

???Conference on Conceptual Processes xxx, 1999 – Transitioning to CMMI with MBASE

ATT Forum, June 2000 – Small Project Empirical Cost/Effort Estimation

USC-CSE Annual Research Review, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000

Skill Areas:

•       Platforms: NeXT, SUN, HP, SGI, DEC Alpha, Auspex, Macintosh, PC

•       Programming languages: Java, ObjC, C, C++, SQL, Fortran, 68000 series Assembly, Pascal, Forth, Lisp, Smalltalk, Post­Script, BASIC, APL. (Scripting languages:) Perl, [c][ba]sh, matlab, sed, awk, tcl[tk], Javascript, HTML

•       Environments and specialization's: NeXTstep, UNIX (BSD, Linux, Mach), Microsoft OS (WinNT, '95, etc.), system troubleshooting and administration, network design and construction, computer security

•       Knowledge of system administration, computer networking (TCP/IP, SNMP, etc.), distributed computing, cryptography, algorithms, numerical analysis, digital and analog circuits, electronics, amateur radio (general class), technology training, technology consulting

•       Extensive knowledge of Software Development Methodologies - OOAD (OMT, Fusion, UML), E-R (RDBMS), ISO-9000-3, author of ISDM (Integrated Systems Development Methodology)

 

 

References:

 

1)       Prof. Barry Boehm (USC) 213-740-8163

2)       Prof. Larry Bernstein (Stevens Institute)

3)       Prof. Hoh In (Texas A&M)

4)       Prof. Victor Basili (UMD)