William Nye
Electrical Eng. graduate from University of Florida, with PhD in Electrical Eng. and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
| Headline: | Engineer |
| Skills: | C/C++, Computer Engineering, Design, Electrical Engineering, Embedded systems, Engineering, Flash, HTML / CSS, Human-Computer Interaction, Javascript, Languages and Platforms, PHP, Python, Software Engineering, SQL, System Administration, Unix, Web Development, Windows |
| Location: | San Leandro, CA |
| Groups: | 2011 UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition, 2012 UC Berkeley Startup Competition, UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition 2009-2010, [INACTIVE] UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition 2008-2009 |
| Interested in: | Consulting opportunities, Finding team mates, Meeting new people, Providing services to startups, Trading services |
| Tags: | flash multiplayer games |
| Schools: | California State University System - Hayward, University of California System - Berkeley, University of Florida |
WORK EXPERIENCE
| Employer: | Epsilon Active Inc., San Leandro, Ca |
| Position: | Co-founder/President and HatManDo game developer |
| Time period: | December 2003 - November 2006 |
| Description: | #3 ELABORATION OF MY OWN STARTUP COMPANY
In Epsilon Active starting in 2004, two of my CSUEB thesis partners and I created the HatManDo ("Hat-Man-Due") series of interactive games in which multiple players participate in entertaining games designed to be fun while subtly improving cooperation and teamwork skills. We don't use the word "multiplayer" because the players are not each sitting in front of a computer and playing over a network with mouse, keyboard, or controller. Instead, several players -- say three or four teams of four -- play by walking around in close proximity in a medium-sized room area. When a player moves (while being tracked by an overhead camera), his face icon on a large projected game screen immediately moves with him, and this simple interaction is all that is needed to play. We don't target "gamers" or others seeking a high-paced controller-driven activity. The business opportunities for HatManDo include licensing to arcades, dance clubs, casinos, cruise ships, museums, team- building companies, and Chuck-E-Cheese style venues that handle kids birthday parties. I alone wrote around 40,000 lines of Flash Actionscript in a 1-year time to implement our 10-or-so games. I also wrote C++ DirectX code to grab camera frames and track user positions. See http://home.comcast.net/~eactive/pvt/eActive_Inc.swf |
| Employer: | Cal State Hayward |
| Position: | Masters in Multimedia Program (nights and weekends) |
| Time period: | December 2000 - November 2003 |
| Description: | #2 ELABORATION OF MASTERS IN MULTIMEDIA
I started the program in Fall 2001 and graduated in June 2003. The first year was all classes, the second, a group thesis project. Our project was "iStory", a dynamic interactive story VR environment. It consisted of an 8x8x8-foot "cave" in the middle of which a user stands and can look around in all directions at images of our 3d world, rear-projected onto each of the four sides of the cave. It had floor sensors for walking-in-place navigation that allowed the user to move about through our 3d world -- an island with forests, mountains, farms, and a small village. When the user walked in place on our floor sensors -- in any direction he pleased -- the rear-projected images on all four sides would move together, i.e., "move by", as if he was actually walking on the island. ViaVoice voice recognition coupled to 350 rules in a Soar-based artificial intelligence engine allowed the user to interact with 3d characters. The rear-projected images were created by a 3d engine actually written by another in our thesis group. All the 3d characters -- fully modeled and animated by our group -- had personalities and goals. They interacted with each other dynamically as well as with the user standing in the middle of the installation (cave). The user guided the 3d characters to accomplish their goals, and thus directly affected the outcome of a simple story. See http://mmgrad.csuhayward.edu/archive/2003/iStory/ |
| Employer: | PDF Solutions, San Jose, Ca |
| Position: | Chip yield software Developer |
| Time period: | December 1999 - November 2004 |
| Employer: | Cadence Design, Systems, San Jose, Ca |
| Position: | Software Architect in R&D, Analog Division |
| Time period: | December 1987 - November 1998 |
| Description: | #1 ELABORATION OF 10 YEARS AT CADENCE
At Cadence, I was one of four "founders" of a new, Analog, division in 1988. We developed the Analog Artist product almost entirely from scratch (aside from a interactive simulation environment donated by Harris Semiconductor, which I had actually written myself while there). The Analog division grew to more than 120 people over 10 years and when I left in 1998, had sold over 25,000 licenses of our Artist product (at around $30K per license). I worked on many development projects, on teams ranging in size from 3 to 15 people. The software developers at Cadence, besides writing proposals and functional specs, and developing the code, worked with QA on bugs and enhancement requests, with "central" on code integration issues and any failures of the nightly build and tests, with documentation to write and review product manuals, and directly with customers (at least in the early days). Source code revisioning was first handled by RCS, later by CVS. After working for years with Cadence's Skill (Lisp-based) interpreted language, I wrote a mini-language wrapper I called ooSkill which simplified object-oriented inheritance and polymorphism for our internal development. As an aside, it was during these 10 years that I got a Mac and started hobbying with Premiere and Photoshop; I was essentially a Sun-Workstation-by-day, Multimedia-Mac-by-night guy. |
| Employer: | UC Berkeley |
| Position: | Post-doctoral research assistant |
| Time period: | December 1982 - November 1985 |
| Employer: | UC Berkeley |
| Position: | Ph.D research assistant |
| Time period: | December 1977 - November 1983 |
| Description: | Ph.D research assistant at UC Berkeley in the area of software for optimization-based computer-aided design. |
| Employer: | Harris Semiconductor, Melbourne, Fl |
| Position: | Analog integrated circuits designer |
| Time period: | December 1975 - November 1978 |
EDUCATION
| University: | California State University System - Hayward |
| Time period: | 2003 |
| Degree: | Multimedia, MA |
| University: | University of California System - Berkeley |
| Time period: | 1983 |
| Degree: | Electrical Eng. and Computer Science, PhD |
| University: | University of Florida |
| Time period: | 1974 |
| Degree: | Electrical Eng., MSc |
| University: | University of Florida |
| Time period: | 1973 |
| Degree: | Electrical Eng., BSc |
INFORMATION
| Memberships: | IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers)
ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) eBig (East Bay IT Group, mainly the Startup/Venture-Capital SIG) |
