During my professional career I have assumed many roles: researcher, director, manager, technical lead, senior and junior programmer, technical writer, and sales support  engineer.   I pride myself in versatility.  I can research technical issues, lead a team, give a polished professional presentation, work with clients, and, in a pinch, still do some programming.  I enjoy the variety that comes with this "jack of all trades" approach.

Below are some details about specific skills I have attained over the course of my career.  If you would like to check with current and former colleagues who can attest to these skills, please see Bruce's Professional References.
 

Research

See Bruce's research & publications.
 

Management Skills

In the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center at CMU, I currently co-manage a team in the development and enhancement of the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT).   I am directly responsible for the management of four research programmers.  Previously, I was the director of eCommerce at CarParts Technologies where I led a group of four software engineers in the development of an intelligent B2B trading system and in research into advanced technologies.  Prior to that, I was director of research and development at OpenWebs Corporation, a company purchased by CarParts Technologies.  I was also manager or project manager on 5 projects during my tenures at Carnegie Group (now Logica) and Maya Design Group.   I was responsible for project budgets and schedules on all of these projects.  My responsibilities also included the direction of project personnel and primary contact to the client.  I have used Microsoft Project for project scheduling and tracking on most of these projects.  I took an American Management Association (AMA) course in project management in August 1996.
 

Client and Presentation Skills

I have given many formal and informal presentations to scientists, commercial clients, and management throughout my career.  At OpenWebs, I helped develop a prototype version of our trading software and demonstrated the software at trade shows, sales meetings, and investor meetings.   I have given many technical and research presentations at conferences and workshops throughout my career.  On a number of projects at Carnegie Group (now Logica), I assumed the role of primary liaison to the customer.  I am usually quite successful at working with and developing rapport with clients.
 

Internet Skills

For three years (2000-2002) I was the leader in designing Internet eCommerce software for CarParts Technologies and OpenWebs.  We used Microsoft .NET for our development.   I was also co-designer and developer of a huge, highly interlinked website used to support data collection for my Ph.D. thesis (See http://www.pitt.edu/~bmclaren/ethics/.)
 

Writing Skills

I have co-written two patents, one that has been granted and one that is under review (See Bruce's awards).  During my consulting assignment with the IBM Transarc Laboratory one of my primary roles was as a technical writer for the transaction processing package, Encina.  I have also written many proposals, requirements documents, design specifications, and user guides throughout my professional career.  (For example, see an analysis document I wrote during an independent consulting assignment in early 2000: CBR-Assessment)  Finally, I have co-authored over 40 papers for conferences and workshops during my academic and industry careers (See Bruce's research & publications).
 

Programming Languages (roughly in order of my current level of competence)
 
Common Lisp:

[12 years experience]  I currently program in Lisp, as well as a production language built on Lisp (TDK), in my work in the PACT lab at CMU.  Earlier in my career, I programmed extensively in Common Lisp both at Carnegie Group (now Logica) and at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute.  In both positions, I was involved in the design and development of expert system applications.  Finally, I spent several years writing my Ph.D. program in Common Lisp and the LOOM knowledge representation language (See the SIROCCO web site).

ASP.NET and VB.NET

[6 months experience]  At CarParts Technologies  /  OpenWebs Corporation, we used .NET, specifically ASP.NET and VB.NET, to develop an inter-company trading product.  I did some programming, but most of the coding was done by the team I managed.

Visual Basic:

[3 years experience]  Used Visual Basic to develop an inter-company trading prototype for OpenWebs Corporation.  I was also responsible for developing and maintaining a VB information management system at Carnegie Group (now Logica) over a 3-year period

[1.5 years of experience]  At The IBM Transarc Laboratory, I was responsible for developing Perl scripts to identify and correct errors in technical documentation. I also used Perl extensively as part of my Ph.D. project at the University of Pittsburgh.  In particular, I wrote many scripts designed to parse the text of engineering ethics cases and to translate that text to a Common Lisp representation.  I've also written scripts designed to automatically insert HTML mark-up into text files.  See the website http://www.pitt.edu/~bmclaren/ethics/ for examples of this work.  Click here to view an example Perl program I wrote as a consultant in April 1999.

[6 months experience]  I took two courses in Java while working for Carnegie Group (now Logica).  I programmed a protoype user interface for a logistics application during a 6-month consulting assignment for the Maya Design Group.  More recently, I worked in the system test group at The IBM Transarc Laboratory, programming Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) system tests.

[2 months experience]  I wrote a simple search engine for The IBM Transarc Laboratory web page using JavaScript.  I have read the entire O'Reilly text book on JavaScript.

[1.5 years of experience]  I learned object-oriented design and development in 1994 using SmallTalk.  I built a prototype intelligent tutoring system for the U.S. Army while working for Carnegie Group (now Logica).

[2 years of experience]  I have programmed in C on various projects during my professional and academic careers.  Mostly lightweight stuff, however; I'm not really a heavy-duty Unix or C guy.

[2 years of experience] My first professional job after undergraduate school involved COBOL programming for General Electric in Erie, PA

During my undergraduate and graduate years I learned and used these languages.  In 1983 and 1984, I taught three introductory Pascal programming courses at the University of Pittsburgh.