Sean Levy, Professional Hacker
352 Roup Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15232
Phone: 412.361.7802
E-mail: attila@stalphonsos.com

Employment History

Feb 1998 - Present

Systems Administrator, Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science

Responsibilities include security, Linux and Digital Unix.

Sept 1996 - Jan 1998

Senior Member of Technical Staff, Lycos, Inc.

System Programming Team Lead, responsible for reporting system for Lycos Web service, benchmarking, troubleshooting, and general software development projects in the Operations Group. Managed a team of four people including self. Directed week-long benchmarking session at Digital Equipment Corp.'s Greenbelt, MD benchmarking center.

1990 - Sept 1996

Senior Research Programmer, n-dim Group, EDRC, CMU

System architect for n-dim, an information-modeling tool and support system for collaboration. Design and implementation of all facets of the system and co-authorship of publications as a part of a team of 6 developers (4 graduate students, 2 staff) and multiple faculty/researchers.

System includes a portable, prototype-based, object-oriented environment (BOS), with associated object-oriented programming language (stitch), interfaces to relational database management systems and user-interface toolkits.

1988 - 1990

Research Programmer, EDRC, CMU

Project programming and facilities support. Duties included maintenance of the Distributed Problem Solving Kernel (DPSK), X programming, Common Lisp programming, general UNIX systems programming and support, and hardware and software facilities support and liaison with CMU CS department.

Project work included expert systems development using KEE on Sun 3 and Symbolics LISP Machines, communications and user interface software for concurrent engineering design environments developed at EDRC, a Motif-based DAG visualization toolkit and applications, and various projects involving integration of multiple programming languages and representations (Scheme/C, LISP/Fortran, etc.).

1985 - 1987

Partner/Developer, Benway Computer Systems, San Diego, CA

Contracted to develop software for vertical market (auto body shops). Designed and implemented proprietary software development environment and tools on IBM PC/XT in C and assembler (15k lines), and then used these tools to develop the target application.

1981 - 1985

System Programmer, University of San Diego

Duties included maintenance of the hardware and software facilities of the Academic Computing department's Vaxes, AT&T 3b2, PDP-11 and microcomputer systems. Also responsible for development of in-house account management, email software and other system software.

Computer Knowledge and Experience

Platforms

* Most Unix workstation types (DEC, Sun, HP, SGI, IBM, NeXT)

* Intel/DOS-based computers (low-level assembly language programming, systems development using C and text-based UIs; no MS Windows experience)

* Symbolics LISP Machines

* VAX/VMS

* Various other operating systems and environments (TOPS-10, TOPS-20, CP/M, several PDP-11-based systems, etc.)

Languages and Environments

* stitch, an OOPL designed and implemented principally by self as a part of the n-dim system (derived from the SELF language).

* C, Java, C++, Objective-C, LISP (several varieties), Smalltalk, FORTRAN, Pascal, BASIC, Tcl, various assemblers.

* yacc, lex, awk, csh, sh, perl, postquel, SQL, etc.

Specific Areas of Expertise and Interest

Large-Scale Software Systems: Architecture, design, implementation, and the philosophical aspects of negotiating the systems development process in general.

Threads: Both implementation of threads packages themselves, and of multi-threaded applications that use them. Have worked extensively with various POSIX threads implementations, Solaris threads, Mach CTHREADS, and other hand-rolled threads implementations (native ISIS threads, QuickThreads).

Object-orientation: OO Programming Language/Environment/Application design and implementation.

Distributed Systems: RPC/Message-passing, Group communications. Extensive experience with the ISIS toolkit (free and commercial versions). Have worked on building toolkits for distributed systems (DPSK, hand-rolled socket-based libraries).

Databases: Experience with ingres, postgres, Oracle, Informix, as well as raw ISAM files and customized query mechanisms.

Information Modeling/Indexing/Retrieval: Have worked with SMART, WAIS, as well as on the n-dim system and with various home-grown tools. Applications and elicitation of concept networks, mapping raw data (i.e. text and pictures) to underlying database structures etc. Also have maintained an interest in SGML, and have used various freely available tools for document preparation and literate programming.

Garbage Collection: Design and implementation of garbage collectors, strategies for use of GC techniques in non-traditional ways.

Language Design and Implementation: Byte code/virtual machine implementations (have not yet built a native compiler).

User Interfaces: Both toolkit design and application design and development. Toolkits/environments used: X Windows (Motif/Athena/Xt as well as raw Xlib, Tk), various LISP-based tools under Unix and on LISP machines.

General System Programming and Administration: Shells, Daemons, low-level "glue" code, programming odd devices, etc. Have administered most kinds of Unix platforms.

Education

Fall 1981 - Summer 1984

University of California at San Diego (UCSD)
Course of Study: Philosophy
Degree Attained: None (left early to form Benway Computer Systems).

Summer 1981

San Diego Community College
Course of Study: Two high-school senior-level English classes as part of fulfillment of requirements for entrance into UCSD.
Degree Attained: High School Equivalency Certification.

Fall 1978 - Summer 1981

Gomper's Junior/Senior High School, San Diego, CA
Course of Study: General high school curriculum, with a focus on mathematics, science and computer programming.
Degree Attained: None.

Gomper's is a "magnet" school that provides special computer, science and mathematics courses and facilities to its students. First learned to program on Gomper's PDP-11/60 in BASIC, Assembler, TECO, Pascal and FORTRAN.

Selected Publications and Technical Reports

Yoram Reich, Suresh Konda, Ira Monarch, Sean Levy, Eswaran Subrahmanian `Varieties and issues of participation and design', Design Studies No 17 (1996), pp 165-180

Birgitte Krogh, Sean Levy, Allen Dutoit, Eswaran Subrahmanian `Strictly class-based modeling considered harmful', in Proceedings of HICSS-29: 29th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science J.F. Nunmaker, Jr. and R.H. Sprague, Jr. (eds), IEEE Computer Society Press (1995), Vol 2, pp 242-250

Sean Levy, Eswaran Subrahmanian, Suresh Konda, Robert Coyne, Art Westerberg, Yoram Reich An Overview of the n-dim Environment, Technical Report EDRC-05-65-93, Engineering Design Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University (1993)

Eswaran Subrahmanian, Suresh Konda, Sean Levy, Ira Monarch, Yoram Reich, Art Westerberg `Computational support for shared memory in design', in Automation-based creative design: current issues in computers and architecture A Tzonis and I White(eds) Elsevier Science Publishers (1993)

Eswaran Subrahmanian, Suresh Konda, Sean Levy, Yoram Reich, Art Westerberg, Ira Monarch `Equations aren't enough: informal modeling in design', Artifical Intelligence in Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing Vol 7 No 4 (1993) pp 257-274

Eswaran Subrahmanian, Robert Coyne, Suresh Konda, Sean Levy, Richard Martin, Ira Monarch, Yoram Reich, Art Westerberg `Support system for different-time different-place collaboration for concurrent engineering', in Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Workshop on Enabling Technologies Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WET ICE), IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA (1993), pp 187-191

Ira Monarch, Suresh Konda, Sean Levy, Yoram Reich, Eswaran Subrahmanian, Carol Ulrich `Shared memory in design: theory and practice', in Proceedings of the Invitational Workshop on Social Science Research, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work (Paris, France), Départment Sciences Humaines et Sociales, CNRS, Paris, France (1993) pp 227-241