Alex Bowe

Resume

Alex Bowe

Email : bowe.alexander@gmail.com
Blog : www.alexbowe.com
Git : www.github.com/alexbowe

  • Academic with industry experience, including games (AI and physics) and web database applications.
  • Three years tutoring and leading teams of tutors underneath me.
  • Achieved highest award for every subject at uni, and the highest honours thesis score in my year. Focused on Information Retrieval and Mathematics.
  • Seeking research and development position with focus on advanced algorithms and machine learning.

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science (Bioinformatics) - in progress
University of Melbourne, 2013 (expected)
GPA: N/A

First Class Honours in Computer Science (Information Retrieval)
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 2010
GPA: 4.0

Bachelor of Computer Science (Computational Mathematics) with Distinction
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 2009
GPA: 4.0

Education Highlights

  • Wrote my honours thesis on Multiary Wavelet Trees in Practice - a compressed text index never previously implemented or analysed empirically, but used frequently as a theoretical device in proofs. Designed an entirely new alternative structure during this.
  • Used Hadoop and NLTK to implement an automatic, distributed keyphrase extractor in Python.
  • Researched and presented summary of MapReduce framework for GPUs in CUDA.
  • Implemented and profiled a small Database Management System, external merge-sort, and sort-merge join in C.
  • Implemented a lexer and parser for a toy language using Flex and Bison.
  • Implemented a simulation of an operating system process scheduler.
  • Researched and wrote an essay about the origins, rationale and practicality of Erlang.
  • Lead small teams for two software projects, using Scrum and XP.

Employment History

Infinite Interactive
August 2009 - September 2009
Worked on the game Puzzle Quest 2. I established a framework for particle systems using Lua, easing the creation of complicated effects, and created a tool in C# to define and visualise cubic splines. Prior to this, paths were specified numerically, and there was no way of seeing it until the game was compiled and running. This enabled the job to be done by the artists rather than the programmers, and much more rapidly. I also redesigned a memory-efficient, incremental A* search in C++, which reduced memory use by approximately 89% on the Nintendo DS.

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
March 2007 - Current
During my studies I held the position of head tutor for Computing Theory and Professional Computing Practice. My duties included delegating tasks among other tutors, organising class material, and maintaining student marks. I also delivered material as a tutor for several other subjects, including Operating Systems, Assembly, and Software Engineering. This contributed to my leadership skills, clarity of explanation, and confidence in public speaking.

Serraview
September 2010 - November 2010
Wrote automated component and unit tests for a web application. These were guided by the requirements document, and I was required to document when and why some requirements were not testable. I furthered this by proposing solutions to some of the problems. This gave me experience with technical documentation.

Infomedia
October 2009 - February 2010
Worked on a web database application in Adobe Flex, with a PHP and MySQL backend, utilising an MVC framework. Here I initiated the use of a unit testing framework.

Activities

  • Blogging about programming, mathematics, and education.
  • Organises a fortnightly blogging group - "Write Club" - to develop blogging as a habit.
  • My own coding projects, such as programming a visual tool to assist with refactoring by diagramming repetition in source code.
  • Participates in weekly group discussions about research papers.

Awards

  • CS&IT award for Academic Excellence in the Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours) at RMIT, 2010
  • Vice-Chancellor's list for Academic Excellence (finished in the top 2% of RMIT Higher Education students), 2010
  • Vice-Chancellor's list for Academic Excellence (finished in the top 2% of RMIT Higher Education students), 2009
  • Graduated with Distinction (had a GPA higher than 3.0), 2009
  • CS&IT award for Academic Excellence in the final year of Bachelor of Computer Science at RMIT, 2009
  • CS&IT award for Academic Excellence in the second year of Bachelor of Computer Science at RMIT, 2008
  • Hoang Huy Pham memorial prize for Academic Excellence in the first year of Bachelor of Computer Science at RMIT, 2007
  • University of New South Wales Australasian Schools Mathematics Competition High Distinction (top two percentile) medal, 2004

Society Memberships

  • IEEE Computer Society
  • Bioinformatics student group at University of Melbourne
  • Golden Key International Honour Society (top 15% of University students)

Skills

  • Interests: Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Bioinformatics, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Modern Algebra, Combinatorics, GPGPU
  • Languages: Python, Ruby, Erlang, C, C++, Scheme, C#, Java, Assembly, Awk
  • Paradigms: Functional Programming, Object Oriented Programming
  • Tools: Flex and Bison, Unit Testing, Git, SCons, Vim
  • Graphics: OpenGL and GLSL, Gnuplot