Mikel Maron
mikel_maron at yahoo.com
Brighton, UK & San Francisco, CA
Objective
My interests include geographic and location focused
applications, ecological simuations, and emerging, distributed
Internet architectures. I'm looking for short or long term positions
and collaborations, with technology companies, artists groups,
academia, or research agencies.
Work Experience
Software Developer : Independent : January 2002 - present
I have been pursuing several projects and products, independently
and in collaboration, based in weblog architectures and the web
mapping community.
Major projects completed and in progress:
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worldKit is a Flash and XML based web mapping toolkit.
World as a Blog is a highly regarded project in geographic
visualization of distributed data.
Several tools have been released for the Radio Userland
platform.
Details on my current efforts can be found on my weblog Brain
Off.
Senior Developer : Yahoo! Europe : June 2000 - August 2001
Internal transfer to Yahoo! Europe, to lead personalization
internationally. Monitored, contributed to, and guided core
software development, especially relating to international
deployment. Provided knowledge resources for international
developers and producers. Built and maintained front-end and
back-end servers.
Major projects included:
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Launched and made significant contributions to European
products -- Points, Message Boards, Corporate Yahoo,
Finance, Wireless, Maps, News and Messenger
Brought European systems up to date, including OS,
webservers, and databases
Internationalized My Yahoo content and simplified
distribution
Built prototypes of Behavioral Personalization and SOAP
interface to the User Database
Senior Developer : Yahoo! : June 1997 - June 2000
Engineer for My Yahoo!, and personalization accross the Yahoo
Network. Drove growth of personalized content and functionality,
integrated disparate systems, and made contributions to core
software. Led a small team of developers focused on My Yahoo.
Worked with practically all product and functional groups during
the growth of Yahoo, from a start-up to multi-national
corporation.
Major projects included:
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Modules, content, and editing infrastructure of My Yahoo
Core infrastructure of Yahoo's web application platform
XML content distribution system
Yahoo Bookmarks, and personalization of many other
Yahoo properties
Cobranded My Yahoo (including a DHTML version)
Membership statistics systems
Internet Programmer : Pheonix Media Group : October 1996
- April 1997
Web based programming in a Unix/Oracle environment on
several large scale commercial projects. Assisted the System
Administrator in configurations and installations and interacted
with various departments in creation and maintenance of the
websites at Personals Network and Boston Phoenix.
Major projects included:
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Education and
Internships
Construction of Personal Pages system - users can create
and easily revise home pages on the Personals Network.
(U.S. Patent #6,253,216)
Developed an Advertisement "Click Through" tracking
and statistics reporting system for the Boston Pheonix.
Developed an email address verification system.
Wrote software to construct natural language emails from
raw data.
University of Sussex
MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems
Completed with Distinction in August, 2004
Dissertation: An Ecological Approach to the Evolution of
Complexity
Major projects included:
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Evolutionary simulation of ant colony foraging
Simulation of Industrial Melanism
Research in spatial and stocahstic ecological models
Finite State Machine based web screen scraping (My
Yahoo 2 RSS)
California Academy of Sciences & Center for Habitat
Restoration
Intern, March - June 2003
Contributed to several restoration ecology projects in San
Francisco; bird monitoring at Herons Head Park, water quality
and zooplankton monitoring and analysis at Mountain Lake, and
removal of invasive plants.
University of California, Santa Cruz
Bachelor of Arts in Computer and Information Sciences, Theory
Emphasis
Graduated with Honors in June, 1996
Major projects included:
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An adaptive agent for the game Othello
Hyperspace visualization application
An auditory cellular automata
Universal Turing Machine
Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American
History
Intern, June - August 1995
Technical Skills
Worked closely with curators to develop online exhibits for the
Information Technologies, Textiles, and Numismatics divisions of
the Museum. Provided networking and software assistance to the
Smithsonian at large.
Extensive experience in software development, especially object
oriented programming and the latest WWW platforms and
technologies. I can quickly gain competency in new languages
and systems.
C/C++ Programming. Perl Programming and Module
Development. Unix Application Development and
Some Personal
Interests
Admin. Apache Webserver Programming and
Configuration. Javascript and DHTML. XML RSS and Web
Services. Flash MX Actionscript. Radio Userland and
Frontier. SQL. Java.
Bicycle Touring and Commuting. Wildlife and Restoration
Ecology. Electronic music, sound synthesis, and animation.
Power kiting. Sacred Geometry. Aikido. Snowboarding.