http://luizirber.org

Luiz Carlos Irber Júnior

Summary

• Software Architect and Developer with a track record of building systems that allows people to focus on their areas of expertise.

• First I built systems to help people focus on their areas of expertise. Now I want to help them to do things they didn’t even know were possible, while at the same time training them on the basic skills they need to be computationally literate.

Skills

• Experience with the design and development of desktop, client-server, mobile and scientific software applications. Recent projects were mostly in Python and C++, but languages used proficiently in the past include C, Objective-C, Java, JavaScript and Fortran.

  Worked with several development platforms/libraries (such as Cocoa, Maemo, and Cray supercomputers), tools and frameworks (e.g. Flask and Django) working on Linux, Mac OS X and also iOS.

  Strong knowledge of scientific programming, web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.), algorithms, data structures and other concepts and paradigms relevant to software development.

Education

• Ph.D. student, Computer Science and Engineering

  University of California, Davis, 2015-

  Michigan State University, 2014-2015

• B.E. Computer Engineering

  Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar), 2004-2010

Professional History

• From June to September 2016 I worked as a summer intern in software engineering of the Metagenomics Computation and Analytics Workbench (MCAW) project at the Industrial and Applied Genomics Group of the Accelerated Discovery Lab at IBM Research. MCAW is the main informatics platform used in the Sequencing the Food Supply Chain Consortium. It is a compute cluster and web application that enables the management and analysis of DNA and RNA sequence data using extensive bioinformatics methods.

  Projects included:
  • Scale-out bioinformatics using Apache Spark
  • Capability extension using Docker and Mesos
  • Advanced visualization of genomic data and statistical analysis results (in Python and R)
  • Experimentation with novel bioinformatics methods

  Since September 2015 I’m continuing my Ph.D degree at University of California, Davis, working as a Graduate Student Researcher at the Lab for Data Intensive Biology under Dr. C Titus Brown orientation. I’m focusing my research on sketches, streaming and online approaches for biological data analysis. I also joined the Designated Emphasis in Biotechnology (DEB) program on February 2016.

  From January 2014 to August 2015 I was a Ph.D student at Michigan State University, working as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Laboratory of Genomics, Evolution and Development under Dr. C Titus Brown orientation. I developed the k-mer cardinality estimation functionality on the lab software package, khmer, in addition to being a primary code reviewer.

  From September 2013 to December 2013 I worked in the Sync API team at Titans Group. Sync is a whitelabel product for files and contacts synchronization and base to Titans’ Personal Cloud. In the API team we develop the backend used by all our clients (Web, iOS, Android, Windows, OS X) and the Web client, the reference implementation.

  From December 2010 to April 2013 I worked at the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, developing tools for a coupled general circulation model. This includes:

  • Bosun, a runtime environment. It is used to document and automate the tasks related to running a climate model (prepare inputs, compile the code, run the model, archive the results). It is based on Fabric and can be used as a library or CLI.

  • Thalassa, an ocean grid editing application.

  • Setting up a Jenkins server to do continuous integration of the codebase.

  • Maintaining an EasyBuild installation.

  • Help with the data analysis, using the SciPy stack and other softwares like Ferret and GrADS.

  • Operationalization of the model for seasonal climate forecasts.

  • Python training for researchers, including setting up Jupyter notebooks and parallel clusters on the supercomputer.

  From September 2008 to July 2009 I worked at Pinuts Studios, a mobile development company. At first I worked on a prototype for a Maemo application, and after that in their first iOS app.

  Between 2006 and 2007 I worked at Embrapa Instrumentação Agropecuária developing a video tracking application for statistical analysis of animal behavior. More specifically, the research was done to study the effects of pheromone traps on insects, which would avoid the use of chemical pesticides and their impact on nature. It was implemented in Python, using GStreamer for video manipulation and PyGTK for UI.

Open-Source Projects and Other Activities

• During the 30 hours of the first OLPC Game Jam Brasil, in 2007, I co-developed a game called Gambiarra (it means ‘Workaround’ in portuguese). It was written in Python, using PyGame.

  Since 2012 I’’m developing with Arnaldo Russo a sonification tool for scientific data called OceanSound. We presented it as a poster during the Brazilian Oceanographic Conference. Our session in the conference caught the attention of many participants, which praised our work and contributed with new approaches and data to analyze. An updated version was presented at PyCon 2013 and there is a live demo available.

  Spoke in conferences like FISL and PythonBrasil, and also in events at universities such as UFSCar and Uniara. Topics included image processing, game development, HPC and software engineering.

  Non-development activities includes adapting Monty Python sketches to Portuguese and presenting them in PythonBrasil as lightning talks, including a sketch about programming languages based on the Spanish Inquisition. Besides acting, I made a short movie called Salad and I also play guitar. Usually my partner in crime in these art attempts is Gabriel Marcondes.

  Projects can be found at http://luizirber.org and their source code at https://github.com/luizirber.

Certifications and Awards

• Certified Software Carpentry (2014) and Data Carpentry Instructor (2015)

• Winner of the Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud (2013)

• Instructor at the São Paulo Summer School on Global Climate Modeling (2011)

• Bronze medal at the Brazilian Olympiad in Informatics (2004)

Languages

• I am a Portuguese native speaker with fluency in English, with very brief contacts with German and Spanish in the past.