Charles Frankston
Charles Frankston |
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Ab Initio Field Consultants help large enterprise customers deploy Ab Initio's high performance data processing platform.
Director of Software at Cimetrics, Inc. Cimetrics is the industry leader in networked building controls. I was recruited by Cimetrics to develop the software systems that underlie the Analytika product -- an innovative system that leverages Cimetrics' expertise in networked building controls to remotely collect and analyze information about the performance of a building's HVAC systems. This analysis can then be used to reduce energy costs while improving comfort and equipment life for customers. Along the way, I took responsibility for all of Cimetrics IT infrastructure, and proposed a major revision of BACnet (the worldwide standard for Building Area Networks). For more information see Cimetrics - more detail later in this document.
Prepared technical due diligence reports for a variety of companies that GC was potentially investing in, including Smartlink Radio Networks, Bullhorn, Bit9, and others. Spent six months in residence researching potential medical IT opportunities, with a primary focus on the collection and use of anonymized medical records for research purposes. Did research on HIPPA-compliant solutions. This work eventually led to a GC investment in Humedica.
Smartlink Radio Networks manufactures systems that interconnect disparate Land Mobile Radios (i.e. the kinds of radios that police, fire, & other public safety officials use). Did a year as interim VP of Engineering at the behest of the investors. Recruited and hired engineering team, created new engineering facilities, and helped begin architecting the new platform. Smartlink was VC backed (General Catalyst and Highland Capital Partners).
Chief Technical Officer of wireless/mobile software startup. Architected a cross platform (Palm and PocketPC) system for delivering native code applications that could run on mobile devices running either online or disconnected. Server platform was Java/J2EE based and made use of SOAP/Webservices for connecting to backend enterprise systems. Client platform XML-scripted native code on Palm, WinCE platforms. This technology was the primary reason JP Mobile acquired Isovia's assets. Served as Chief Engineer/Chief Scientist at JP Mobile. i2 was a major customer for the applications built using the Isovia technology.
Program Manager in the Component Applications Group (ComApps) of Microsoft Research. ComApps developed methodologies to enable the creation of a large library of reliable, binary re-usable components. This approach was intended to fundamentally change the way software applications are developed. Worked with the people who invented COM.
Participated in the creation of XML. Served as Microsoft's representative to several W3C committees defining XML. Helped to define XML namespaces (http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xml-names/). Designed the Schema language used by many Microsoft products (Biztalk, ADO, etc. See http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/XMLData-Reduced.htm). Co-authored XML Schema submission to W3C, along with IBM: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-dcd, and contributed to W3C Schema language definition effort: http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/, http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/.
Microsoft acquired Charles View Software's development team to jump-start the development of the Trident HTML rendering engine, which was the basis for IE4 (and all subsequent versions of IE, and the new Edge browser. Trident introduced the world to DHTML, and over time transformed the web. I was a developer on the client-side databinding feature, which used various Microsoft (COM, OLE, OLE-DB, ADO) and non-Microsoft (Java, JDBC, Javascript) technologies. This gave me a deep insight into the web browser environment, add-ins, and related security issues.).
President, founder, and co-owner of a small (14 person) software company specializing in contract software development and software internationalization. Clients included Microsoft, Lotus, Delrina, Attachmate, Ventura, PC Docs, Mathsoft, and Dan Bricklin. Contract programming projects included: The Internet Assistant for Microsoft Word, Microsoft Scenes, Lotus VIM to Microsoft MAPI interface, and Dan Bricklin’s Demo-It! for Windows, and Vision Maker -- an OS/2 based drawing system comparable to Corel Draw. Internationalization projects included: Ventura Publisher 4.0 for Japan, Winfax Pro 3.0 for Japan, Attachmate Extra! 4.0 for Japan, MathCAD for Japan, PC Docs Open 4.0 for Korea, FTP Software OnNet 2.0 (Internet suite) for Japan, Korea, and China.
Charles View Software was "acquired" by Microsoft in March 1996.
Senior Software Engineer primarily responsible for the internal architecture of Javelin product – which won InfoWorld Software Product of the Year in 1985 and a PC Magazine Technical Excellence award. Designed and implemented data store, calculation engine, and building-blocks (visual computational elements). Performed sundry other tasks, such as adding expanded memory support to the product two months before shipment. Implemented a client-server based order entry system on two weeks notice when Javelin dropped the price to $99 and started selling direct. This system handled 10,000 orders in its first week of operation.
Helped to set up their LAN. Got to meet Richard Feynman.
Summer work while finishing my undergraduate degree: created the only CP/M version of VisiCalc (http://www.bricklin.com/visicalc.htm), and later helped finish Visicalc Advanced Version for the IBM PC.
Worked as part of a small team designing and implementing a new, state of the art super-computer operating system (see http://www.mit.edu/~cbf/thesis.htm), with an advanced security architecture. Created an in-house local area network based on home grown hardware (this was pre-Ethernet!) and the world’s smallest full ARPANet host (an LSI-11 occupying about 1 cubic foot).
Mixture of part time student work and full time work at the MIT Math Dept. With a fellow student/employee, wrote a real-time OS for the pdp11 in hand-coded assembler to support on-line access to supercomputers at a national laboratory. Started using the ARPANET. Helped develop the original Emacs text editor (with Richard Stallman and others).
Spent much of my undergraduate time at the AI Lab and the Lab for Computer Science. Took graduate level CS courses. Served as chairman of Student Information Processing Board -- an organization that helped students get access to computers (back when computers were scarce). First student representative to Project Athena’s technical committee, where we started the development of what would become the Kerberos authentication protocol that's now used in nearly all enterprise environments, including Microsoft's Active Directory.
FIRST runs Robotics competitions for pre-college students. FRC is the high school level, where the robots are the size of small refrigerators. I'm the primary mentor for our programming our robot, for which we've used a variety of languages over the years -- National Instruments Labview, Java, and most recently hardcore C++. The Ligerbots robot made it to the national championship in 2014, and 2015. Our 2015 robot was ranked 10th in New England.
Variously Soccer Coach, Board Member, Travel Coordinator, and Web Master for NGS (Girls) and NYS (Boys).
I have a long and varied career in which I've used and mastered many different computer platforms, programming languages, database systems, etc., and participated in the creation of some seminal systems and technologies. (E.g. Emacs, DHTML, XML, XML Schemas (XDR, XSD), etc.) This range of experience, combined with the solid foundation that the MIT Computer Science program provides, enables me to quickly digest and master new technologies. I am more than capable of building robust, highly scalable, low-latency, high-performance systems.
Cimetrics is a small (about 25 employees) networking technology company founded in 1989. For most of its existence, Cimetrics has been focused on the building automation field. Cimetrics was an early participant in the creation of the BACnet standard, and Cimetrics has had a longstanding business in selling hardware and software related to BACnet. Cimetrics' BACnet software can be found in the equipment of some of the largest HVAC control companies in the world.
In the early 2000s, Cimetrics decided to leverage its expertise in building control systems to "move up the food chain". Instead of just providing hardware and software to network control systems, Cimetrics launched a product called Infometrics (later renamed to Analytika), which would collect data from HVAC systems then analyze the data to advise building owners on how best to operate those systems. I was hired in 2004 to manage the software development process of Infometrics. Early on, I analyzed the Infometrics architecture in place and concluded that costly proprietary software had been used -- unnecessarily, and an expensive data center had been leased that served no purpose. We re-architected the system to eliminate both, at as a substantial cost savings. We also shifted to a new toolset for our backend analysis (.NET & C#), while maintaining most of the Linux-based data collection pipeline.
We've continued to grow and expand the Infometrics/Analytika service over the years, continuing to improve efficiency (allowing each of our mechanical engineers to efficiently analyze more buildings) and rolling out new products (such as our online self-service portal). Currently Analytika collects and analyzes approximately 20 million data points per day, and that number continues to grow. All data and analysis is available to our customers via an online portal. With an inexpensive infrastructure built mostly on commodity hardware we've never lost any data and achieved an uptime in excess of 99.99% over the last eight years.
Along the way, I essentially took over management of all IT-related infrastructure at Cimetrics -- again greatly improving employee productivity, at very low cost. My responsibilities include maintaining the infrastructure needed for running Infometrics. Here's a partial summary of my accomplishments and responsibilities:
BACnet is the international standard for building automation networks. In general, that means HVAC controls, but it can also be used for lighting, fire, and safety systems. Cimetrics has been heavily involved in BACnet since its inception in 1987. While BACnet does many things well, its networking technology and decisions reflect the environment of the late 1980s -- a time when Local Area Networks (LANs) were just becoming widely deployed -- before most people knew what the Internet was.
In conjunction with Cisco, Cimetrics worked to create an updated version of the BACnet standard using modern networking techniques. This was done in a sub-committee of the BACnet standards group called "BACnet IT". I was Cimetrics lead participant in BACnet IT, authoring many proposals and presentations starting in 2009 (many of which can be found here).
All of Charles View Software’s work was performed under contract for other companies. These were some of our projects: