David Tolpin

SYRENE is SYndrome REasoning NEtwork. Syrene is a set of tools for experiments in syndrome analysis and explanation generation.

Implemented the system in Haskell as a by-product of research in Institute for Information Transmission Problems

DITYPE (http://www.renderx.net/) is a new generation of XEP (http://www.renderx.com/tools/xep.html) rewritten from scratch in Common Lisp and Python and featuring flexible open architecture and smart formatting algorithms. The project is in a pre-release stage.

Returned to RenderX (http://www.renderx.com/) to help design and implement the new generation; organized the development process distributed among teams in three cities and two countries. Wrote the new formatting kernel in Common Lisp and supervised implementation of several other modules in Common Lisp, Python and C.

Polimetrix (http://www.polimetrix.com/) is the first web-based vendor to provide an alternative to phone-based polling techniques based on modern Internet technologies. Examples of surveys run by Polimetrix are available at www.pollingpoint.com.

Designed and specified the survey scripting language, architected the development environment and the survey interpreter; built a small international team of programmers and testers and implemented in Python, with the help of the team, the web-based survey editing, testing and management tools as well as a highly-scalable, fault-tolerant multinode survey running system. Used advanced JavaScript techniques to implement various interactive web-based widgets for rich on-line interviews.

EnMasse is a formatting server. It accepts documents locally or over the network and formats them with high throughput, distributing actual formatting tasks among multiple computers.

Designed and implemented the system from scratch in Python and Java. Implemented efficient load-balancing and node monitoring and recovery algorithms.

RNV is an implementation of Relax NG Compact Syntax validator in ANSI C.

Implemented the validator from scratch. The validator is widely used and is known to be conformant and the fastest implementation of Relax NG. Wrote two implementations of W3C XML Schema Datatypes, in ANSI C and R5RS Scheme, for the validator.

Designed and led a team of engineers to implement the first commercially available and still one of the best implementations of XSL Formatting Objects. Wrote core modules of the formatting engine.

XEP is a native-mode XSL FO processor: the whole procedure of calculating the layout of every page is performed inside, without recourse to any third-party formatting engines like nroff, TeX or whatever else. The processor is written in Java and XSLT. It is used to generate high quality printable documents in PDF or PostScript from data represented in XML.

Served as coordinator to the program in the country. The program is sponsored by United States Information Agency (now Office of International Information Programs of the U.S. Department of State) and coordinated by IREX and is dedicated toward creation of Internet public access sites and to Internet training. The online resources created during my involvement in the program include Hragir and Davidashen (see below), as well as many other pages.

Designed and implemented a non-dictionary stemming algorithm for the Russian language (Rustem). Wrote the stemming module in Scheme and ANSI C. Modified and improved freeWAIS to support 8-bit encodings and calls to external wordform normalizers. Wrote a WWW scanning robot in Perl.

rwww is a set of programs providing search and retrieval functionality (WAIS-based) for Russian-language WWW servers and newsgroups. It was used by a number of websites in Russia before current Russian-aware search engines came into existence. The source code is available for download.

Starting with the reference implementation of Oberon(-1) by Niklaus Wirth, modified or replaced almost all modules of the compiler to convert it to an Oberon-to-C translator. Implemented a hardware-independent mark-and-sweep garbage collection. Ported a number of modules and programs (including Coco, a Compiler compiler for Oberon) to pOt.

pOt is a portable implementation of programming language Oberon (designed by Niklaus Wirth) that translates the source code in Oberon to ANSI or K&R C. It is fast and small and runs anywhere where a K&R or ANSI C compiler is available. The translator is written in Oberon and compiles itself at the bootstrap stage. The source is available for download.

Zenteq – Technology Advisor.

RenderX – Developer, Lead Developer, CTO.

International Research and Exchanges Board – Technical Coordinator for US–Armenia Internet Access and Training Program.

Responsibility: Coordinating project's activity in Armenia

Assisted in selection of institutions for collaboration. Hired people, purchased equipment, opened five Internet public access points in several locations in Armenia. Conducted Internet and Web authoring workshops. Developed and published websites.

Moscow Office of the International Research and Exchanges Board – Webmaster, system administrator for Openweb workshop.

Institute for Commercial Engineering – Engineer.

Responsibility: Installation, support and maintenance of unix servers. Development and support of database-backed, CGI-based websites.

Installed and maintained several servers under FreeBSD. Developed CGI applications and scripts for automatic text processing and generation of Web pages.

Jet Infosystems – DBMS expert.

DBMS (Informix, Ingres) integration and applications. Tuxedo programming.

Russian Federation Center for Financial Information – Software developer.

Developed a hypertext front-end for a database server; coordinated and participated in development of an optical character recognition (text input automation) system.

Master of Science in Applied Mechanics