KEVIN S. VAN HORN

SENIOR SOFTWARE ARCHITECT

Project Management ~ Software Engineering ~ Product Development

Dynamic, dedicated Software Engineer with an extensive mainstream and
R&D background in software engineering, test-driven development, and
the Scrum development process, as well as search technologies,
Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Possess ability to plan and
coordinate software development activities from concept to completion,
as evidenced by successfully leading project teams for Quest
Software. Excellent communicator and problem solver, with exceptional
skill as a liaison between development groups. Respected leader with
exceptional organizational, training and team management abilities.


PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE


THE GENERATIONS NETWORK, Provo, UT  09/2008 -- 02/2009

Senior Development Architect

* Recruited to extend search capabilities of company's genealogical
  search services.

* Created and analyzed a queuing theory model designed to analyze
  needed computational resources and reduce search service hardware
  costs.


VINTELA, INC. / QUEST SOFTWARE, INC., Lindon, UT  08/2004 -- 08/2008

Product Architect / Team Lead

* Developed enterprise systems management software that extended
  Microsoft's Operations Manager and Configuration Manager products to
  manage Linux and Unix systems.

* Enhanced security of the QMX line by designing and implementing a
  privilege separation monitor.

* Served as either team lead or co-team lead for the QMX products and
  Scrum development process.

* Launched a quality improvement program that included code reviews,
  team mentoring, test-driven development, use of mock objects for
  unit testing and educating developers.

* Participated actively in Scrum sprint planning sessions, wherein the
  team plans one month's work.

* Pair-programmed with other developers to provide training and/or
  assistance with difficult problems.

* Introduced and promoted the use of test-driven development (which
  became standard development process), and trained developers in this
  method as well as in C++ best practices.


CAVEON, LLC, Draper, UT  09/2003 -- 04/2004

Independent Consultant

* Automated the process of searching out high-stakes exam fraud and
  exam compromise on the Web by specifying, designing and implementing
  Caveon's WebPatrol system.

* Utilized Java, the MySQL relational DB, the Lucene text indexing and
  search engine, and pattern recognition in the form of a page
  classifier trained to recognize relevant web pages.


NORTH DAKOTA STATE UNIVERSITY, Fargo, ND  08/2000 -- 05/2003

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science

* Researched applying the method of maximum entropy to acoustic models
  for speech recognition.

* Invited by Institute for Signal and Information Processing to review
  software design of their speech-recognition toolkit.

* Developed graduate-level course in generic programming and C++
  library design.


TENFOLD CORPORATION, Draper, UT  05/1999 -- 08/2000

Senior Developer / Technologist -- Core Libraries team 

* Defined, documented, designed and implemented a variety of core C
  library routines used throughout the company.

* Wrote regression tests. 


FONIX CORPORATION, Draper, UT  11/1997 -- 02/1999

Research Scientist

* Performed research and development in the area of automatic speech
  recognition.

* Used Bayesian statistics to derive improved parameter estimation and
  parameter tying methods for the training of large vocabulary
  continuous speech recognition systems.

* Reverse-engineered the OGI speech recognition system for use by Fonix. 

* Trained employees in the use of probability theory and Markov models
  for speech recognition.


EXCITE, INC., Redwood City, CA  06/1995 -- 05/1997

Software Engineer

* Recruited as employee #10 for this Internet startup, initially to
  develop software to generate the NetReviews web pages, a topical
  hierarchy of web site reviews.

* Served as technical lead and wrote most of the software for
  NewsTracker -- a service that scoured the web for news, classified
  and organized articles and provided customized news to subscribers.

* Perfected NewsTracker by significantly expanding its capabilities,
  implementing a monitoring system to identify potential problems
  before users complained, and employing C++ smart pointers and
  container classes to eliminate memory leaks and memory corruption
  errors.

* Extracted reusable software components from existing C++ code by
  encapsulating functionality scattered throughout the code base.

* Re-designed part of the core search libraries, facilitating the
  launch of several key projects.

* Introduced the company to use of the C++ Standard Template Library
  (STL).


SKILLS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

* Expertise in C++, C#, Java, Linux, generic programming (STL, Boost
  libraries), HTML, C, F#, Python, Perl, shell scripting, UNIX
  programming, SQL and multithreaded and multiprocess code.

* Co-holder of U.S. Patent 5280474, "Scalable Processor-to-Processor
  and Processor-to-I/O Interconnection Network and Method for Parallel
  Processing Arrays."


EDUCATION

Brigham Young University
Ph.D. in Computer Science
* Awarded Computer Science Departmental Ph.D. Fellowship

California Institute of Technology
Master of Science in Computer Science
* Awarded AT&T Bell Labs Scholarship and Fuller Fellowship

University of Utah
Dual Bachelors of Science in Physics and Computer Science
* Graduated Magna Cum Laude
* Awarded National Merit and President's Scholarship
* Member, Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society