Problem solver, UI warlord
Greater New York City Area
- Past
- Education
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- The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
- The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
- Recommended
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37 people have recommended Frank - Connections
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418
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- Industry
- Computer Software
- Websites
Frank Jania’s Summary
I find my greatest professional joy when I am designing, developing and inventing new technologies that are meant to enrich the lives of the people that use them. The subject areas I am most fond of are: collaboration and social software, novel and transparent user interfaces, and information visualization. I am a compassionate manager and leader, a sincere teammate who thrives in an environment of smart and creative people who regularly challenge each other, and a prolific inventor with over 65 patents pending.
In addition to my day to day work I am an active member, leader or mentor of several GLBT organizations. For the last 4 years, in an effort to encourage students to pursue careers in technology, I have organized and managed an engineering fair for the Museum of Life and Science that has been attended by over 4,000 local students.
Frank Jania’s Specialties:
Software development, collaborative and social software development and design, inventing and invention development.
Frank Jania’s Experience
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Problem solver, UI warlord - IBM Lotus Connections Core
IBM
(Public Company; IBM; Information Technology and Services industry)
May 2008 — February 2009 (10 months)
UI lead for the Lotus Connections development team, serving as the UI development subject matter expert across 8 applications.
* Choreographing the efforts of 13 UI engineers, in 3 countries, working on a family of 8 applications, to insure that the product's design points are consistently applied and implemented.
* Developing, refining and maintaining the UI Java / JSP code that is common to all services.
* Regularly harmonize with the user experience and visual design teams to assess which features are possible in the current release cycle, and to come up with creative ways to implement their designs.
* Leading the product-wide effort to improve the performance of all of 8 applications.
* Crafted a performance improvement strategy which uses open source & originally developed libraries along with current best practices.
* Delivered an implementation of the strategy which has lead to a nearly four-fold performance increase in the reference application. -
Technical Evangelist - Lotus Software Portfolio
IBM
(Public Company; IBM; Information Technology and Services industry)
July 2006 — 2008 (2 years)
Supported the Lotus brand as a technical evangelist, business partner liaison and consultant for the portfolio of collaboration and social software.
* Developed reusable collateral in the form of documentation, articles, interactive learning labs and code samples in support business partner efforts to integrate with Lotus products.
* Delivered over 70 presentations on collaboration and social software technologies to a variety of customer, business partner and internal IBM audiences.
* Called on as a subject matter expert by several internal groups to consult on plans to implement social technologies inside and outside of the company.
* Supported over 80 business partners in delivering solutions in time for the annual Lotus trade show.
* Represented the business parter enablement department on the Lotus Connections product offering team to insure that the needs of our business partners were addressed in product plans. -
Manager - UI Design and Development; Systems Group
IBM
(Public Company; IBM; Information Technology and Services industry)
July 2004 — July 2006 (2 years 1 month)
Managed a distributed team of UI software engineers located in New York and North Carolina.
* Performed every aspect of personnel management including hiring, separating, developing, promoting, mentoring and coaching, for a department of 18 employees.
* Delivered a balanced budget for employee, contractor and capital expenses in our cost recovery subdivision every year.
* Mentored a team of engineers developing web-based prototypes for the next generation of mainframe system administration tools.
* Lead a team of peer managers in creating a set of expectations and standards which were applied universally across a previously disjoint team.
* Designed and developed a set of tooling for managers to be able to allocate bonus budgets according to HR policy.
* Designed and developed a set of tooling for creating distribution lists, team rosters and organization charts with faceted browsing capability which still serves over 40,000 users per month. -
Problem Solver; Software Engineer - Webahead
IBM
(Public Company; IBM; Information Technology and Services industry)
November 2000 — July 2004 (3 years 9 months)
Worked as a team lead, UI designer and rich desktop client engineer for IBM's most successful advanced technology prototype team.
* Lead a team of 4 engineer/designers in developing an enterprise scale messaging client platform deployed to over 50,000 people.
* Personally designed and developed the user interface and framework for a suite of broadcast messaging applications.
* Iteratively gathered and acted on user feedback from a 1,000+ person community through newsgroups, surveys and direct conversation.
* Facilitated hand-off of the successful prototype platform to the IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5 commercial product development team.
* Designed and developed the UI for a photo resizing tool in the online employee directory which has been used by over 300,000 employees.
* Designed and developed a variety of rapid prototypes to demonstrate the value and practical application of new technologies. -
Visiting Software Engineer - Research
IBM
(Public Company; IBM; Information Technology and Services industry)
2003 — 2004 (1 year)
Hand selected for a six month rotational assignment as a visiting software engineer with IBM Research.
* Consulted for the WebFountain text analytics team to identify a rich client technology platform to use for custom end user applications.
* Delivered a reference implementation of the platform, based on Eclipse, which accommodated plugging-in various text analysis and visualization tools.
* Presented assignment's findings at an internal technology fair attended by 4,000 people. -
Problem Solver; Software Engineer - Sydney 2000 Olympics
IBM
(Public Company; IBM; Information Technology and Services industry)
May 1999 — November 2000 (1 year 7 months)
Worked as a front-end engineer, team co-lead and design liaison for the team that produced the official web site of the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
* Co-lead a team of 6 engineers in producing the site that served 230 million page views to 8.7 million people in 17 days.
* Developed a CGI page filter which resulted in a ten-fold improvement in page performance by identifying and working around a bug in one of the supported browsers.
* Developed an interactive visualization applet that allowed visitors to see what time it was in various parts of the world.
* Developed and maintained the HTML/Javascript templates for all sport and athlete results pages on the site.
* Developed a Perl based content production system for the Paralympic Games site.
* Developed web based tooling to automate the creation of common web content based on templates.
* Developed portions of the front end of the Sydney Olympic online store.
Frank Jania’s Education
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The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
MSEE , Electricial Engineering , 1993 — 1999
Thesis: Applying Visual Analysis to Ground Force Reaction Data in the Study of Gait Pathology
Completed a master's thesis project based on a request by researchers at Lenox Hill Hospital. The researches had purchased a "force plate" which measures the force applied as a patient walks on it in order to analyze gait pathology and athletic performance. Using the Win32 API and OpenGL I wrote software which read the stream of data from the force plate and a video feed. The software displayed a synchronized side by side view of the force plate's data (displayed as a 3-D visualization of the direction and magnitude of the force applied to the plate) and video of the human subject being measured. -
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
BEEE , Electrical Engineering , 1993 — 1997
Thesis: Reduction of Low Frequency Loudspeaker Distortion Using an Adaptive, Driver Independent, Digital Signal Processing System
Completed a senior thesis project with the goal of reducing distortion in low frequency loudspeakers by performing a real time analysis of it's moving parts. This hybrid digital/analog project involved implementing an adaptive filter algorithm in assembly language on a Spectrum PC/C5x DSP board. The filter's response characteristic was controlled by analyzing the output of an accelerometer mounted on the speaker's cone.
Additional Information
Frank Jania’s Websites:
Frank Jania’s Groups:
ACM SIGCHI
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The Greater IBM Connection: IBM's alumni program for past and present IBM employees -
Interaction Design Association -
The Cooper Union Alumni Association -
IBM co/ex workers independent group -
User Experience -
Design Mind -
Adobe Flex Group -
RTP Startup Weekend -
Friends and Family of GLBT IBMers -
Google Wave Interest Group
Frank Jania’s Honors:
# 2008 - Master Inventor, IBM Corporation
# 2007 - Top 10% performer stock grant award, IBM Corporation
# 2007 - First place - Outstanding presentation award, IBM Academy of Technology
# 2003 - Outstanding technical achievement award, IBM Corporation
# 2002 - Top 10% performer stock option award, IBM Corporation
# 2000 - Gold medal achievement award, IBM Corporation
# 1999 - Team award - Sydney Olympic Online Store, IBM Corporation
# 1997 - First place - Student paper / presentation competition - Northeast Region, IEEE
