technospin.org

About

Dennis Grinberg
6408 Bartlett Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15217
dennis at grinberg dot info
412-480-9465
http://www.technospin.org

PROFILE

Senior technology professional experienced in software development, technical management and operations. Proven ability to accomplish goals even when faced with rapidly changing business conditions. Excellent problem solver and communicator to technical and lay audiences, coupled with customer focus, pragmaticism, creativity and good judgment.

EXPERIENCE

Director of Software Development,Matrix Solutions, Pittsburgh, PA (Aug 2002-Present)
Responsible for design, development and maintenance of MatrixPlus, a sales strategy and data analysis tool for media industries. Reported to the VP of Operations.

Functioned as Program Manager and Development Manager for all product development efforts, communicating requirements originating at customers and company to development staff. Coordinated and oversaw all development efforts. During this time, several updates to the company’s core product were released and the core product was completely redesigned and made available to customers. Provided appropriate communications with stakeholders and entire company.

Educated non-technical senior management on importance of software development processes in producing quality software and mitigating risks. Added Documentation, Quality Assurance and additional developers directly as a result of this education process.

Implemented fundamental development and communication practices and processes which had a profound impact on the operations of the entire company. Most notably, source control, issue-tracking, source documentation, and collaborative knowledge management systems are used by different departments in the company for diverse purposes.

Led effort which reduced issues reported by customers by over 300% and instilled confidence in the quality of our software in several of our largest customers.

With external consultant, designed company’s internal customer database, used to track financial (contract, renewal, payments, commissions), support and training data. Oversaw implementation of the system, currently in daily use across the company.

Developed standard hiring practices for the Development Department, parts of which were adopted companywide.

Managed the Software Development Department including budgeting, purchasing and staffing.

Acting Chief Operations Officer, Red Square Systems, Pittsburgh, PA (Sep 2001-Mar 2002)
Responsible for the delivery and support of outsourced computer networking and infrastructure services to small and mid-size clients. Managed a delivery team comprised of 20 technical employees. Served as the liaison between the sales and delivery teams. Reported to the CEO.

Improved the efficiency of the technical service billing structure, increasing reported utilization by 60% with a minimal impact on existing work practices.

Designed and implemented a formal recruitment process. Used the process in doubling the size of the delivery team from nine to twenty qualified, high performers. Increased product offerings by successfully recruiting outstanding engineers enabling the company to sign a number of key clients.

Conducted an analysis of billing rates and contract procedures. Designed structures to reduce billing discrepancies, improve billing rates and improve customer satisfaction.

Provided the technical vision and project management for the internal ERP system which encompasses both the customer and service databases. This system insures that all client revenue is recorded and billed with fewer errors and reduces DSO (Days Sales Outstanding).

Hired customer service coordinator as the primary point-of-contact for clients to improve customer service and satisfaction.

Consultant, iCarnegie (formerly Carnegie Technology Education), Pittsburgh, PA (Jun 2001-Aug 2001)
Carnegie Technology Education, a subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon University, offers Internet-based learning and certification for software developers.

Designed the framework for a certification exam to meet the following objectives: (1) to provide an accurate assessment of a programmer’s competencies; (2) to dismiss the potential for cheating even when the test is administered in multiple sites and on multiple occasions; and (3) to test various development language specifics as well as general techniques such as object-oriented programming, data structures and algorithms.

Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer, e-Cruise, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA (Oct 1999-May 2001)
Co-founded e-Cruise, Inc., a vertical marketing channel for the cruise industry. e-Cruise applied an Application Service Provider model for potential cruise passengers via a personalized web portal, and provided a unique CRM tool, the Booked Passenger Experience, to cruise lines and travel agents for distribution to their cruising clients. Reported to the CEO.

Led development of the e-Cruise product/site. Incorporated technology allowing the presentation to change in a matter of days, rather than the norm of weeks or months to provide enhanced customer experience and to capitalize on private-label sales opportunities.

Researched and resolved the problem of non-technical authors contributing content to the site by using a combination of commercial and internally written XML translation tools. These tools also served to shorten the content delivery lifecycle.

Negotiated contracts with domestic and offshore development partners and managed those efforts together with internal resources. Appropriate mix resulted in a high quality, reduced cost development effort.

Researched and selected the company’s technologies and products including site hardware/software configurations, site platforms and hardware and software for internal corporate use.

Created project plans for product rollout. Coordinated work with technical, graphics and content teams.

Managed the technology department including budgeting, purchasing and staffing.

Senior Systems Designer, CLARITECH Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA (May 1997-Sep 1999)
CLARITECH developed a suite of tools for the analysis of natural-language texts. Provided supervisory and hands-on technical skills to the team responsible for information extraction technologies. Oversaw the Information Extraction Project from the research to the implementation stage. Reported to the Director of Technology and Development.

Designed, wrote and enhanced software to extract semantically motivated entities from unstructured text with high accuracy.

Achieved a strong working relationship with the Information Extraction team at Justsystem Corporation in Japan by researching and utilizing appropriate cultural practices.

Designed and implemented a gold-standard based robust testing environment for the Extraction System allowing developers to quantify how modifications affected system accuracy.

Designed the seamless integration of information extraction technology with APIs for information retrieval, routing and summarization.

Lecturer and Teaching Assistant, Bar-Ilan University, Israel (Oct 1987-Jun 1990)
Lecturer and teaching assistant for a number of mathematics and computer science courses.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Israel (Feb 1987-Jan 1990)
Designed and developed database applications for an IDF unit. Last rank: Staff Sergeant.

PATENTS

Data Compression. U.S. patent #5,384,568, January 1995. This patent describes an efficient data compression algorithm based on the move-to-front heuristic utilizing a secondary level of move-to-front enabling high compression ratios for redundant data.

PUBLICATIONS

Dennis Grinberg, John Lafferty and Daniel Sleator, A robust parsing algorithm for link grammars. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, pages 111-125.

Dennis Grinberg, Sivaramakrishnan Rajagopalan, Ramarathnam Venkatesan and Victor K. Wei. Splay Trees for Data Compression. In Proceedings of the Sixth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pages 522-530.

Lucille Glassman, Dennis Grinberg, Cynthia Hibbard, James Meehan, Loretta Guarino Reid and Mary-Claire van Leunen. Hector: connecting words with definitions. In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference of the UW Centre for the New OED and Text Research, pages 37-73.

EDUCATION

Master of Science, Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 1993
Ph.D. program in the School of Computer Science, all but dissertation, 1990-1997
Master of Science, Mathematics and Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, 1990
Bachelor of Science, Mathematics, and Computer Science, magna cum laude, Bar-Ilan University, 1986