Eamonn O'Brien-Strain

Biography

Eamonn O''Brien-Strain is a researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. He has more than twenty years experience in research and development, including building design tools for chip designers and system engineers at GEC Research in England, AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey, and Cadence Design Systems in California. He has also chased the Silicon Valley dream and helped in several start-ups, the latest of which was a dot-com company acquired by HP in 2001.
Thirteen published patents (seven granted so far) in areas of design automation, imaging, encryption, image management, and content transformation.

At HP Labs, O''Brien-Strain is currently leading an agile team of developers in building a web harvesting, presentation, and sharing system.  As architect, personally designed and built a horizontally scalable deployment on an elastic cloud infrastructure using a distributed NoSQL backend, a rapid-development REST tier, and an AJAX-driven front end.  Invented and deployed an innovative functional-programming pattern for composing simple REST services in a web-native way.  As product owner, guided the graphic design and user-experience teams, managed the prioritized user-story backlog, and guided the development team in selecting the user-stories for each two-week sprint.  As agile evangelist, coached the development team on Scrum methodology and set up metrics, continuous integration, and support for test-driven development.
Was software architect for a research lab, defining data models, frameworks, and architectures that allowed a diverse group of engineers to integrate web analysis and document layout technologies into end-to-end cloud-deployed applications.
Was a computer science researcher working with filmmakers, artists, and designers to understand how aesthetic rules can be incorporated into software.  Built systems for generating automatically-designed magazines and video multimedia presentations.
Previously worked on future mobile and ubiquitous Internet systems, including design tools and infrastructure for web service development, distributed data systems, and global Internet naming systems without a central authority.
Released several open source projects including Sparta XML, a lightweight XML parser, and Nrby Photos a popular WebOS phone app.
Was main programmer for Sparta XML, an open source Java package that includes lightweight XML parser, DOM, and XPath..

Research interests

Building web-scale architecture. Helping non-professionals create aesthetically pleasing and profession-looking media, including video, photographs, magazines, and brochures.

Publications

• "Snapfish Lab: An Open Online Imaging Community", Peng Wu, Eamonn O''Brien-Strain, Jerry Liu, 2008 International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, MMSP2008, October 2008
• "Image collection taxonomies for photo-book auto-population with intuitive interaction", Pere Obrador, Nathan Moroney, Ian MacDowell, Eamonn O'Brien-Strain, September 2008, DocEng '08: Proceeding of the eighth ACM symposium on Document engineering
• "Securely Propagating Authentication in an Ensemble of Personal Devices Using Single Sign-on", Prakash Reddy, Eamonn O'Brien-Strain, Jim Rowson, ESAS 2004: 178-189
• "Updating Encrypted XML Documents on Untrusted Machines", Prakash Reddy, Robert N. Mayo, Eamonn O'Brien-Strain, Jim Rowson, Yuhong Xiong,. SEC 2004: 425-440
• "Rememberer: A Tool for Capturing Museum Visits", Margaret Fleck, Marcos Frid, Tim Kindberg, Eamonn O'Brien-Strain, Rakhi Rajani, Mirjana Spasojevic, September 2002, UbiComp '02: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Ubiquitous Computing
• "From Informing to Remembering: Ubiquitous Systems in Interactive Museums", Margaret Fleck, Marcos Frid, Tim Kindberg, Eamonn O'Brien-Strain, Rakhi Rajani, Mirjana Spasojevic, April 2002, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Volume 1 Issue 2
• "Co-Design Made Real: Generating and Verifying Complete System Hardware and Software Implementations", Mark Baker, & Eamonn O'Brien-strain (1999).  In Embedded Systems Conference. San Jose, CA. 

Patents

7