From idea to product, I solve UX issues at the intersection of design and engineering. I find and further Google’s most innovative product concepts and bring them to life with design and engineering chops. I partner with engineers, researchers and designers to define, refine and deliver new products and exciting features.

As a member of Samsung Research America’s Think Tank Team (TTT), I was responsible for researching and bringing novel technolgoies to life. At TTT, I worked from the PCB to the application layer developing hardware, firmware, software and machine learning.

The goal of this project was to build a functional, Ardunio-controlled power supply. We designed the supply and controller so that users can connect an old laptop wall wart (output voltage between 14 and 20V) to the supply’s Vin line and digitally specify the desired output voltage in the range between 0 and 12 V. Assuming the builder already has an Ardunio and a laptop charger with the right specs, parts for a single source should cost around $15. This project was published to Instructables where it won several prizes and has had over 70k views.

The goal of this project was to label a tweet as written by either a news source or an individual. I also explored the classification of news and celebrity tweets. Data was captured from some of Twitter’s most prolific tweeters.

A fuurin (風鈴) is a wind chime found thoughout Japan in the summertime. In this project I designed, machined, cast and post-processed a fuurin with a unique body, zetsu and organic texture dubbed Crystal Fuurin. This work spans ideation to design to manufacturing to glamor shots.

At Basis, I worked at the intersection of firmware, hardware and mechanical engineering. I created and tested circuitry for Basis’ 2nd generation product, aided in testing novel activity classification techniques, worked with vendors to prototype mechanical housings, and architected inexpensive ISO standard compliant testers, among many other tasks.

For this project, I built a mobile system capable of recognizing multiple foreign banknotes with varying levels of occlusion. The system uses a client-server architecture, in which the mobile device sends an image potentially containing banknotes to the server. This server applies the note recognition algorithm to find and process any banknotes in the image and then sends the image back to the mobile device with additional information superimposed on the image. This information includes detailed banknote positions, countries of origin, and value in both local currency and USD. The bill recognition algorithm utilizes SIFT and RANSAC to detect banknotes in a variety of orientations, scales, and settings.

At Synapse, I worked on various client-driven projects including magnetic body data transmission circuits, machine learning signal classification and GUI development. I was responsible for working on a variety of systems, ranging from circuits to software.

A close friend was coaching me to beat my half marathon personal record. In the span of 2 months, I put more miles on my legs than some people put on cars. During training, I wanted an easy way to visually correlate my pace to location and elevation. Some solutions already existed, but they all had complex UIs and improperly processed GPX data. I decided to develop a solution that properly presented GPX data in a simple, usable fashion. Enter Mapdat: pure jQuery and Bootstrap, using HTML5 for local file upload and Google Maps v3 for map display.

At Infinera, my goal was to further optimize and automate testing of PICs (photonics integrated chips). I was responsible for thoroughly understanding the subcircuits of the PIC to test, generating the testing protocol, writing high-level interface software for photonics lab equipment, placing the results in a database, and analyzing the results.

Long distance runners know that being prepared mentally and physically before the gun can make a big difference to their performance. Rundle.it is a service that sends out pre-made packages containing all essential endurance race needs. This was created to simplify race preparation and reduce stress for runners. I was contracted to develop the site. Rundle.it was developed with Stripe for payment processing, Bootstrap and Font Awesome. The original design has since been modified by Rundle.it’s owner to add more content.

While working at SpaceX, I was responsible for verifying the functionality of mission-critical avionics hardware. To ensure space-readiness, I developed boards to automate tests. In addition, I subjected each component of avionics hardware to rigorous mechanical testing to simulate the trauma of launch and the harsh space environment.

As a member of the TEDxCornellUniversity steering committee, I took on the responsibility of establishing and maintaining advertising, branding and media. This was done through a series of productions including the TEDxCornellUniversity website, pamphlets for attendees of the TEDx event, posters to advertise around campus and one large banner to mark the event’s location.

Under the Cornell University Kessler Fellowship scholarship, I worked for the startup company Skybox Imaging (now Terrabella at Google) as a software and electical engineer. I validated communications hardware, developed kernel modules, and learned the basis of agile software development.

This project used PHP-predict, jQuery and Google Maps V3 API to plot the realtime locations of satellites using ephemeris data from Celestrak.com. Calculations performed on the server-side were sent to the client via JSON data. These calculations find the current velocity and position of each satellite in ECI which are then converted into latitude and longitude and fed into the Google Maps API. The tracker displays the satellite’s current footprint as well as its trajectory of the past and future 10 minutes.

This project was developed during the 12-hour Mozilla World Of Hack hackathon event on Friday July 22, 2011. The general idea of the project was to search through the text of the Weekly World News (tabloid made famous by Bat Boy) to find patterns that would identify that particular “news” source. These patterns were then used to determine whether an input string was similar to the Weekly World News - in essence, a tabloid detection algorithm.

I worked as a contractor for Georgia Tech’s NEETRAC (National Electric Energy Testing Research and Applications Center) to unite a machine learning algorithm (written in Matlab) and a standard browser. The web application interfaced with Matlab code compiled using the Matlab JA builder. The site uses Google Web Toolkit with a Java servlet backend (Tomcat). A fully featured version is not linked due to the proprietary nature of the code.

I was contracted by the student organization AIESEC to design a reusable poster for upcoming information sessions. AIESEC aims to set up students with jobs abroad. Most students had the impression that these jobs were with small, non-profit organizations. AIESEC needed to advertise future events as well as correct the image that most students held of their offerings. The poster needed to stand out agasint a backdrop of hundreds of others and contain vital information about the organization and future events.

Browndig is a highly customized implementation of Wordpress designed from the ground up. Wireframing and full design were carried out in Photoshop prior to implementation. I modified the default Wordpress PHP scripts to include writing analysis and custom blog content creation. Animations were designed using the script.aculo.us library. The blog also featured tight social integration with Digg and Facebook at a time when this had not yet become a widespread practice.

At NASA, I worked for a satellite communications team that was struggling to visualize and analyze the large amount of data received by their hardware. I designed a basic web interface to represent large volumes of raw telemetry data for satellite test evaluation in a readable format. Live data was piped into Matlab and C++ scripts, which autogenerated the HTML. I accomplished single page application functionality through the use of AJAX and javascript before crossplatform libraries for this task existed.

As a engineer, I need an elegant but funtional portfolio. This is my answer. mdigman.com was built on Twitter Bootstrap framework, in addition to jQuery and HTML5/CSS3 standards. This means my portfolio features responsive design and cross-platform (including mobile) compatibility. Each component of the site was templated using the Liquid templating engine and statically compiled with Jekyll. Hosted for free on Firebase.