Anthony Cassandra
P.O. Box 201054
Austin, TX 78720-1054
(720) 213-8669
arc@NOSPAM.cassandra.org
Employment
Chief Architect
March 2005 through present
Pronto, Inc.
Boulder, CO / Austin, TX
I have been at Pronto since its inception, originally joining as a Senior Scientist working on data mining and data analysis projects. I was one of a team of 4 people that designed and built the entire back-end data analysis and distributed processing pipeline for Pronto.com. This system is what powers Pronto.com today, and is capable of continually crawling web sites, processing data feeds and analyzing the data for tens of millions of products from tens of thousands of merchants each day.
I then moved onto being responsible for the architecture and project management of the service layer that serves this data to the front-end applications. This service layer consists of three main services: a search service, a database service and a data analysis service. This service layer has scaled to handle Pronto.com's traffic of tens of millions of search and product requests per day.
Once the service layer was built and tuned, I was brought into the application development team to specify, architect and manage a new initiative for adding social shopping features to our web site. At its peak, this project required coordinating a team of 10 people, spanning product design and development. This project also involved requirements gathering from our Sales and Marketing Teams.
After successful completion of this project, I had the most experience at the company with both the back and front ends of Pronto's technologies, and I was promoted to VP of Information Solutions. This position made me responsible for creating, managing and inter-team coordination for all search and data projects and a few search-related, front-end application projects. This meant constant coordination with all our Product, Development, Data Quality, Sales and Marketing Teams. These projects helped to continually enhance the quality of our search and data, as well as improve the site economics resulting in the company reaching profitability within 3 years of its creation.
Other accomplishments:
  • Gathered requirements, designed, implemented, tested and documented Pronto's Partner API, providing external access to search and product data. Also served as the technical liaison for all external partners using the API. (HTTP, Java, XML, XSLT, Tomcat)
  • Designed and implemented semantic analysis and feature extraction logic, including extraction from text and images. These features serve to enhance product search results and search filtering, and is also used for SEM keyword generation and SEO page optimizations. (Perl)
  • Designed and implemented caching layer and programming abstractions for caching. (Memcache, Java, Perl)
  • Designed and implemented Firefox shopping add-ons, including the Mozilla-featured Pronto Shopping Messenger, the Pronto Shopping Helper and an internal data quality reporting tool. (Javascript, XUL, CSS, XPCOM, AJAX, XPATH, DHTML)
  • Design and implementation of distributed product normalization logic to provide product groupings for price comparison pages. (Perl, MySQL)
  • Designed and implemented application search logic, including search overrides, auto-disambiguation logic and alternative query logic. (Java, MySQL)
  • Designed system and process for defining, managing and displaying web application search filters. (Java, Perl, PHP, MySQL)
  • Designed system and process for defining, managing and displaying product browsing taxonomy. (Java, Perl, PHP, MySQL)
  • Designed and implemented web-based tools for data editing and dynamic data deployment. This system also provides version tracking, change histories and rollback abilities for data stored in databases.(PHP, Javascript, MySQL, JSON, AJAX, DHTML)
  • Designed and implemented logic for SEM keyword generation process. (Bash Shell Scripting, Perl)
  • Designed and implemented data quality tracking and monitoring tools. (Perl, CGI, PHP, Javascript, MySQL, JSON, AJAX, DHTML)
  • Designed and implemented system for detecting new products for price comparison pages. (Bash Shell Scripting, Perl)
  • Worked with Systems and Network Operations Team to define hardware specifications and configurations to support overall software architectures.
  • Performed hardware capacity planning and defined performance monitoring/healthcheck interfaces for software services.
  • Specification, planning and architecture for A/B testing platform for search.
Research Fellow
May 2004 through June 2005
Department of Psychology
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX
  • Research, design and development of mathematical models and algorithms used in human spatial navigation and decision making research studies.
  • US Patent No. 7,620,493, "System, Method and Apparatus for Providing Navigational Assistance", co-authored with Brian J. Stankiewicz, awarded November 17, 2009.
Consultant
May 2004 through January 2005
POMDP Inc.
Austin, TX
  • Design and development of graphical monitoring interface for visualization of distributed agent network communication. Implementation in Java for European Commission Joint Research Centre's as part of EDEN Inland Water Research Project.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
August 2002 through December 2004
St. Edward's University
Austin, TX
  • Taught undergraduate classes in computer architecture, computer organization, assembly language, software engineering, mathematical optimization, data structures, algorithms, system administration, Java, C++, Scheme, Perl, Python.
  • Planned and implemented computing and network infrastructure for new undergraduate computing laboratory.
Consultant
June 2003 through December 2004
Telcordia Technologies, Inc.
Austin, TX
  • Design and development of statistical models to improve the robustness of military logistics in a distributed agent architecture.
Consultant
February 2002 through April 2002
Reveal Technology, Inc.
Austin, TX
  • Technical research, market analysis and evaluation of new products for instrumentation of Java applications.
Senior Software Engineer
March 2001 through December 2001
TowerJ Corporation
Austin, TX
  • Managed the testing and benchmarking teams.
  • Designed and prototyped management module for a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
  • Designed and implemented tools for automated testing, benchmarking and performance analysis of JVM.
Adjunct Assistant Professor
August 2000 through May 2001
Department of Computer Science
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX
  • Taught two semesters of Analysis of Algorithms to third year undergraduate students.
Director of Engineering/Chief Scientist
January 2000 through February 2001
Enetica Solutions Inc.
Austin, TX
  • Director of Engineering during development of the company's first product, including project and personnel management.
  • Gave technical presentations and demonstrations to potential strategic partners, investors and the Board of Directors.
  • Authored eight patent applications and three provisional patent applications.
  • Architect for the company's first product, a development infrastructure for deploying robust distributed applications.
  • Authored both external and internal technical documentation including: business plan, functional specification, architectural documents and user documentation.
  • Designed basic architecture for company's second product, a distributed network management system.
Member of Technical Staff
September 1997 through January 2000
Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC)
Austin, TX
  • Managed research and development projects, including customer relations management.
  • Designed and implemented research prototypes for:
    • ontological reasoning algorithms and data structures for agent brokering in peer-to-peer agent system;
    • intrusion detection system using peer-to-peer agent system;
    • complex event processing engine for DARPA (Rome AF Labs);
    • work-flow process awareness engine; and
    • agent simulation system for doing comparative analysis of agent brokering algorithms.
Education
Brown University Providence, R.I.
Ph.D. in Computer Science
"Exact and Approximate Algorithms for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes."
May 1998
Brown University Providence, R.I.
M.Sc. in Computer Science
May 1994
State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, N.Y.
B.S. in Computer Science/Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Summa Cum Laude
May 1992
Suffolk County Community College Selden, N.Y.
A.S. in Computer Science
August 1990
Refereed Publications
Brian Stankiewicz, Anthony Cassandra, Matt McCabe and William Weathers Development and Evaluation of a Bayesian Low-Vision Navigation Aid Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. November 2007.
Anthony Cassandra, Marian Nodine, Shilpa Bondale, Steve Ford and David Wells Using POMDP-Based State Estimation to Enhance Agent System Survivability Proceedings of the Second IEEE Symposium on Multi-agent Security and Scalability (MAS&S 2005). August 2005.
Brian Stankiewicz, Matt McCabe and Anthony Cassandra A Low-Vision Navigation Aid Using Ideal Observer Analysis Journal of Vision, 4(8), 895a. August 2004.
David Wells, Paul Pazandak, Mariane Nodine and Anthony Cassandra. Adaptive Defense Coordinator for Multi-agent Systems. Proceedings of the First IEEE Symposium on Multi-agent Security and Scalability (MAS&S 2004). August 2004.
Mariane Nodine, Anne Hee Hiong Ngu, Anthony Cassandra and William G. Bohrer. Scalable Semantic Brokering over Dynamic Heterogeneous Data Sources in InfoSleuth. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. September/October 2003.
Anthony Cassandra, Damith Chandrasekara and Marian Nodine. Capability-based Agent Matchmaking. Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2000). June 2000.
Donald Baker, Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, Hans Schuster, Anthony Cassandra and Andrzej Cichocki. Providing Customized Process and Situation Awareness in the Collaboration Management Infrastructure. Proceedings of the Fourth IECIS International Conference on Cooperative Information (COOPIS). 1999.
Nicolas Meuleau, Kee-Eung Kim, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, and Anthony R. Cassandra. Solving POMDPs by Searching the Space of Finite Policies. Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. July 1999.
Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Michael L. Littman and Anthony R. Cassandra. Planning and Acting in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains. Artificial Intelligence. 1998.
Anthony R. Cassandra, Michael L. Littman and Nevin Zhang. Incremental Pruning: A Simple, Fast, Exact Algorithm for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes. Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. July 1997.
Eugene Charniak, Glenn Carroll, John Adcock, Anthony R. Cassandra, Yoshihiko Gotoh, Jeremy Katz, Michael L. Littman and John McCann. Taggers for Parsers. Artificial Intelligence. August 1996.
Anthony R. Cassandra, Leslie Pack Kaelbling and James A. Kurien. Acting Under Uncertainty: Discrete Bayesian Models for Mobile Robot Navigation. IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). September 1996.
Michael L. Littman, Anthony R. Cassandra and Leslie Pack Kaelbling. Learning Policies for Partially Observable Environments: Scaling Up. Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Machine Learning. July 1995.
Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Michael L. Littman, Anthony R. Cassandra. Planning and Acting in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains. Proceedings of Kunstliche Intelligenz. 1995.
Anthony R. Cassandra, Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Michael L. Littman. Acting Optimally in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains. Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. August 1994.
Invited Talks
"POMDPs: Who Needs Them?" Forum on Artificial Intelligence, University of Texas. Austin, TX. November 2003.
"CEDMOS - Complex Event Detection and Monitoring System." DARPA/Rome Laboratory Planning Initiative (ARPI) Workshop. Arlington, VA. October 1998.
"An Algorithm for Dynamic Programming Updates in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes." Sixth INFORMS Computer Science Technical Session Conference (CSTS). Monterey, CA. January 1998.
"Discrete Bayesian Models for Mobile Robot Navigation." AAAI Spring Symposium. Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. March 1996.
"Learning Policies for Partially Observable Environments: Scaling Up." Action Workshop. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Spring 1995.