Hi There! Thanks for visiting. Here's the scoop on
my job:

I've been at Stottler Henke Associates, Inc. (sounds like a law or accounting firm, doesn't it?) for two years now. SHAI is an artificial intelligence software company. We do a lot of research and prototyping for different government offices (military, NSF, NASA, others) as well as commercial development and consulting.

When I was in school, I became interested in data mining. Data mining focuses on using statistical and AI techniques to discover interesting patterns and relationships within data sets that are frequently too big for humans to analyze without assistance. It extends into a lot of performance issues as well, like scalability, distributed databases and distributed processing, as well as data and information visualization (another interest of mine).

I started my job search looking for work in data mining and found my job at SHAI. The first project I worked on there was a data mining application called Ikoda, the "Intelligent Knowledge Discovery Assistant". I primarily worked on information visualizations for the different mining algorithms. Funny, I liked doing that but otherwise am not too excited about user interface. I think I liked it because I got to design them myself and was challenged to present a lot of information and make the visualizations interactive. When IKODA came to a close, I worked on an intelligent tutoring system to teach data structures and on a project for NASA for payload scheduling on the space shuttle.

I am currently working on three projects. One, that is nearly finished, is a tutorial authoring system for a commercial customer. Another uses an interactive clustering method to detect improper database activities (for example, a disgruntled employee deleting account records). We are using IKODA as a framework for the interaction.

The third, which I am managing, is a two-year project to develop a decentralized agent system that will respond to network failures, attacks, or other events that degrade performance, in order to maintain overall network reliability. While writing code comes very naturally to me and I can do it all day long, some of the project management tasks are much more tedious. But I figure these are skills I need to develop. Plus, I don't think anyone else wanted the job!

I like working at SHAI. There are only 11 full-time people in my office in the University District of Seattle (just a few blocks from the University of Washington); the "home" office is in San Mateo. I live only a mile from work and usually bike. Everyone in my office gets along, and we've done "office activies" like going to a Mariners' game at the new Safeco Field, to the Seattle Symphony, to watch a movie at the OmniDome (like an IMAX, only a dome), cross country skiing. I've gone biking and white water rafting with one co-worker, and play on a soccer team with three others. Overall, the work is good and interesting, and the atmosphere is great. It's the only job I went after, and I'm glad I did.

SHAI has a lot of AI information on its web site. Other good places to go are:

• The American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and
• KDNuggets newsletter archive and "Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Directory".