DAMON HART-DAVIS: Résumé

Distributed, Parallel and Grid Computing

This has been the focus of my interest in computing for 20+ years, for example:

Main Strengths

Happy dealing directly with CxO and other senior-level management to help understand constraints and help sculpt a robust solution.

Java, C++, parallel, distributed and resource-constrained systems, networking, UNIX/Linux, C. Derivatives systems (quants, P&L, risk management), Web publishing, small-team technical management, digital electronics, high-level problem solving and ideas generation, sales and technical presentation.

Java "Expert" in Sun's Java Community Process in several areas (JSR-41, JSR-65, JSR-96) and assisted informally with their CLDC/KVM design for J2ME, and in locating a parallelism-related bug (CMS parallel remark) in JSE6 garbage collection. Taught embedded C and Java techniques to Belgian partners in General Motors' OnStar programme and speaker in Sun-sponsored banking and security seminar Oct 2001. A featured JDK1.6 user at the launch of JSE6 in December 2006.

Major Technical and Management Projects

May 09--now: Ecotricity collaboration for the LIVE - Carbon content of the UK Grid page based on own more geeky version.

Sep 08--now: Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), London, in Credit / Central Pricing working in Java/C# on ABS pricing and handling and risk computations on the task farm/grid. Delivered a C# Excel real-time (RTD) add-in to connect traders' spreadsheets directly to the Central Pricing servers.

Jan 96--Jun 08 (with ~3yr break from May 00): Lehman Brothers, London. On contract to various parts of Fixed Income (research, systems and trading) initially to parallelise and improve quants code and systems. I have been based in London, but also worked in the New York and Tokyo offices.

Some significant LB projects in brief:

Aug 02--Sep 06: CTO of Ixaris, leading the design, development and build-out of the J2EE-based EntroPay virtual credit-card system, with a (mainly-Malta-based) R&D staff of 20+ for this UK company. The technology included Sun telco-class servers, JBoss and MySQL, as well as private secure links over the Net to banking/clearing counterparties, including VPN and TLS/SSL-secured connections and custom security techniques. Ixaris had raised well over £3m of venture capital by March 2006.

Mar 01--Apr 01: Leading a jWorkers consultancy team at BTLooksmart (a search-engine dot-com) measuring and improving Web application performance for a JSP/servlet-based syndicated search service.

May 00--Aug 00: VP Technology for digitalRUM, a dot-com m-commerce B2B2C startup in London. Design authority and team manager from business requirements though to beta with rapidly expanding team up to about 15 staff.

Mar 98--Apr 00: Monis Software, London. A consultant to their London software team; designed their Java-based real-time market-data handler Data Transformer (DT) system.

Oct 94--Mar 97: Nomura International plc (NIp), London. Directly on contract to Swaps and the Asset-Trading Group (ATG), supporting and developing new applications for traders, and streamlining Swaps' overnight batch system for computing daily profit-and-loss, risk-management hedges, etc. I parallelised and distributed existing and new subsystems for up to 100-fold speed improvements using an RPC-based cache of my own design of thousands of live financial instruments, whilst increasing reliability of the reports and accounting many-fold.

Jun 93--Oct 93: BP Exploration, systems administrator (with two others) for complex multi-vendor (HP, IBM, SGI, Sun) distributed UNIX system (70+ machines) glued together with DNS, NIS and NFS/automounter over Ethernet and FDDI.

Feb 91--Jun 93: Technical Editor, then Editor, of Parallelogram, an international technical journal covering parallel and high-performance computing, with a world-wide circulation of approximately 6,000 as of Dec 92.

Aug 90--Oct 93: Consultant to BAeSema (previously Dowty-Sema) on high-performance and open-systems technology on the largest-ever Ada projects in the world to then (over GBP100m) for the SSCS and SMCS frigate and nuclear-submarine weapons command-and-control systems. Handled material classified up to NATO Confidential.

Apr 88--now: ExNet Ltd, MD. Raised GBP75,000 in venture capital whilst an undergraduate to do private research in networking and distributed operating systems.

Aug 85--Jun 86: Personal Robots Ltd, Systems Engineer. Designed and implemented a real-time, multiprocessor, distributed robotics operating system in products featured on the BBC's ''Tomorrow's World'' and ''Wogan.'' Later went on contract to them while at university.

Education

Oct 91--Sep 94: MSc in Theoretical Computer Science (Parallel Systems), Edinburgh University.

Oct 86--Jun 90: 2:1 BSc (Hons) Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Edinburgh University.

Sample Publications

May 07: Register articles on being an official UK election Observer with the collected material available at gallery.hd.org/brighton-election.
Apr 07: jWorkers compilation of top-end UK-centric Java contract agencies.
Jan 01: "First Person" article for New Scientist magazine.
Aug 96--now: DHD Multimedia Gallery (code), pro-bono source of free multimedia with millions of visitors per year. Made extensive use of Google's AdWords and AdSense advertising programmes, as well as the networks of TribalFusion, CasaleMedia and AdBrite.
Jan 91--Jun 93: Various articles and journalism for Parallelogram magazine, eventually becoming Editor.
Jul 89: "Cloning and characterization of an Escherichia coli gene, pcnB, affecting plasmid copy number": Molecular Microbiology (PubMed ID 2677604, scan).
Nov 84: ETI (Electronics Today International): "Perpetual Pendulum" project.

Other

Apr 07--Dec 07, Feb 08--Dec 08: Accredited UK Election Observer.

Personal

Born York, England, Aug 1967. Technophile, would-be traveller and linguist. I have visited many parts of the world on business and holiday: the US many times (including NYC, the Midwest and the Bay Area), the Continent (especially Paris) many times, Japan (Tokyo), HK, Israel, Egypt and South Africa (Cape Town). I speak a very little Japanese, French and Spanish, and even less German.
Contact tel: +44 20 8296 5555; email: dhd@exnet.com; WWW: http://d.hd.org/. Agencies: you must contact me directly before putting me forward to clients.