Alan Thomson

Background

About Alan Thomson

Experienced principal engineer with a demonstrated history of designing and developing large scale object oriented software systems in highly competitive markets. Founder of Blind View Studios, dedicated to improving the lives of those with low vision. ° Lead architect of a flexible and robust real-time video processing platform allowing AT & T/DIRECTV to deliver revenue-generating features to more than satellite and internet customers across the United Stages and Latin America. ° Developed and implemented a solution for a set-top box issue in over hotel rooms across the United States without expensive hardware or software changes in any of the hotels. ° Saved millions of dollars for DIRECTV by extending the usefulness of its fleet of legacy satellites by seamlessly delivering a replacement for one of its aging video processing systems. ° Enabled Xerox to realize a cost savings of $7,937,595 per year for over 8 years by automating the virtual printing and verification of 15,642,606 pages per week without any additional hardware or software purchases. ° Scrum Master for a team which designed and developed a distributed IPDS Raster Image Processor (RIP) for the Xerox CiPress 500, a high-speed, full-color, continuous feed printer with sustained speeds of 1090 (simplex) and 2180 (duplex) pages per minute in C++ on the Solaris UNIX platform. ° Performance analysis of systems resulting in the design and implementation of various improvements which nearly doubled throughput of complex image processing libraries. ° Refactored areas of complex systems to improve reliability and maintainability of critical software components while allowing for new features to be easily integrated. ° Led teams which developed new features allowing for new product lines to be brought to market. ° Part of a team which designed a high-level software architecture for a distributed image processing system which was completely scaleable without any artificial constraints on computing power or geographical location of any specific component. ° Gathered and analyzed customer needs in order to develop system requirements and architectural designs for new products. ° Multiple programming/scripting languages with an emphasis in C++ under Linux/UNIX environments ° Audio/video/image processing, parallel processing, and back-end.