Ovidiu Dan

Contact

Best way to contact me: contact@ovidiudan.com
Google Voice US number: +1-484-893-0253
VoIP number in US:          +1-415-651-0403
VoIP number in UK:          +44-203-298-3318
VoIP number in Romania: +40-365-567142

contact@ovidiudan.com (XMPP)
contact@ovidiudan.com (SIP)
smartystg (Skype)

Shorter version of this document

Educational Background

• Graduate School - PhD student at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA. Ongoing (currently on leave).
  Working with the WUME lab, which is directed by Prof. Brian D. Davison. At WUME I work with: Na Dai, Liangjie Hong, Xiaoguang Qi, Zhenzhen Xue, Zaihan Yang, Dawei Yin.
• Graduate School - Master of Science in Computer Science from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA. Graduated January 2012.
• College/University - Bachelor of Engineering in Information and Technology from INHOLLAND University Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Java/C/PHP, Soft Eng, Cisco, Linux, Math, Business). Graduated in January 2009, six months early, with an A on my thesis.
• High-school - "Alexandru Papiu Ilarian" national college, Targu Mures, Romania - Profile : Mathematics and Computer Science - 2001-2005. I was awarded the "Papiu" prize for academic excellence.

Skills

• Programming
  • PHP/MySQL/HTML - 5+ years experience in web programming in PHP for high traffic websites
  • Java - 3 years experience in writing distributed data mining applications and API servers in Java: Hadoop, JGroups, XML-RPC
  • Python, C/C++, Assembly
• Data/web mining - two years experience
  • Text categorization
  • Text clustering
  • Distributed web crawlers
• Networking/Administration
  • Linux - 5+ years experience in Linux server administration
  • Cisco - Completed the CCNA 1-4 and Wireless academic path courses
  • Skilled in many software packages under Linux or Windows
• Language skills
  • Romanian - native
  • English - fluent (14 years of training). Certifications: Cambridge Certification - Grade A, TOEFL - 117/200 (taken Oct 2008), SAT verbal - 680/800
  • Hungarian - basic conversational (I'm part Hungarian)
  • French - very basic (I understand most common nouns and verbs. I can usually make out the meaning of simple written sentences)
• Project Management / People skills
  • 2 years experience in managing small to medium-sized teams
  • 1 years experience teaching PHP to a high-school class
• Driving license

Research

2011 (Summer)

Summer internship at Microsoft Research and Bing. My mentors were Pavel Dmitriev from Bing, Ryen White from MSR, and Xin Fu from Bing. While I was at Bing I won the intern hackday contest with another intern (against 9 teams, 38 people).

2010 (Summer)

Internship at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, NJ. Worked with Junlan Feng and Bernard Renger on filtering social media messages for Social TV.

Working with the WUME Lab on web mining / social networks projects.

Conducted research in data mining and distributed systems for newistic.com.

Writing a geographically aware DNS server. Unlike standard DNS servers, it can redirect visitors to the best/closest mirror of a distributed web service based on their country of origin. Version 2 (August 2008 onwards) adds redirection based on the Autonomous Number of the user's network and on server uptimes.

Built a distributed data storage framework, as part of a research project. It was used as a storage component for data mining research conducted in the summer of 2006. The resulting research paper is available on request.

Wrote a Downloads Search Engine. It scanned 6-7 downloads websites continuously for new products. The search engine organized the products in "download nodes" by grouping download sources and different versions of the same software. The search engine is currently licensed to Playfuls Entertainment.

Papers

Ovidiu Dan, Junlan Feng, Bernard Renger, Enhancing Social TV through Social Media Mining - submitted for TV Content Analysis, published by CRC Press, mid 2011

Liangjie Hong, Ovidiu Dan, Brian Davison, Predicting Popular Messages in Twitter - won the WWW 2011 Best Poster Award out of 90 posters

Ovidiu Dan, Junlan Feng, Brian Davison, Filtering microblogging messages for Social TV - WWW 2011 demo paper

Ovidiu Dan, Liangjie Hong, and Brian D. Davison, Personalized Message Recommendations in Twitter-like Social Networks - work in progress

Horatiu Mocian, Ovidiu Dan, and Moustafa Ghanem, Parallel-QT: Quality-based Large-scale Document Clustering - work in progress

Horatiu Mocian, Ovidiu Dan, New Developments on the Newistic Platform - UICS 2009, October 2009

O. Dan, H. Mocian, Scalable Web Mining with Newistic, The 13th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD-09), April 2009

O. Dan, H. Mocian, Newistic: a distributed news gathering and analysis platform. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligent Systems '09, Chennai, India, January 2009

O. Dan, H. Mocian, StorCH: A Distributed Self-Organizing Storage System, 2006

Web Programming Work Experience

2008 (Summer)

PHP (Scalability) - Funded by Google to work on an open source project via their Google Summer of Code 2008 program. I extended the Coppermine Photo Gallery to allow flexible mirroring and distributed photo storage.

Plone/Python - 5-month internship at the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong. I helped them develop their new website (not yet online) using the Plone platform, which is written in Python.

PHP/MySQL - Wrote the DNS management frontend and backend for geoscaling.com. GeoScaling is a DNS server which makes routing decision based on the country of end users, their network name, server uptimes and other information.

PHP/MySQL - Wrote the content management system for tvkon.com, a video streaming website.

PHP/MySQL - Web programmer for Playfuls Entertainment. Written most of the underlying web programming for jucaushii.ro and playfuls.com. Playfuls.com had a peak of 3 millions visitors/month and was hosted on four servers.

PHP/MySQL - Worked as a web programmer at the STG NGO. My job was to write PHP frameworks for portals and e-commerce websites. Created 6 versions of the STG Portal, a framework for building content websites.

PHP/MySQL - Built and maintained two portals for Radio Mix FM - Targu Mures, Romania. One version is still in production here.

Linux/Networking Work Experience

September 2010 » Present

Working as a Graduate Assistant for the High Performance Computing initiative at Lehigh, which is part of the Library & Technology Services. Some of my responsibilities include: helping maintain the several computing clusters at Lehigh, offering technical support for programs written to run on these clusters (Condor, Hadoop, PBS/TORQUE), writing documentation etc.

Designed and built a gigabit network backbone for Papiu high-school, Romania (switches, routers, media converters, racks, wiring, Linux server administration).

Linux Administrator and Programmer for several clients from US and Romania. rentsmarty.net promotes my consulting services.

Building a mission-critical infrastructure for geoscaling.com that will enable the company to provide geography-aware DNS and fault-tolerance, as well as a content delivery network.

Built a Linux-based solution for taking ~real-time screenshots of remote websites on demand, for cryocopy.com.

Network administrator for Playfuls Entertainment (playfuls.com). Took care of 4 servers in Romania and one in Germany. Built a distributed content serving infrastructure with PHP/MySQL+Squid. Worked with database replication and file synchronization between the servers. I configured firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems and wrote a few network monitoring scripts.

Built a Linux/MPlayer/Bash-based solution for encoding any kind of video files into flv (Flash Video) streaming files, for tvkon.com.

Network administrator for the STG NGO for 3 years. I worked with web servers (Apache, lighttpd), database servers (MySQL, PostgreSQL), domain-name servers (Tinydns/DjbDNS, BIND), e-mail servers (Qmail, Sendmail), Samba etc. I worked with many Linux distributions including Fedora, Debian, Suse, Slackware and Gentoo.

Network administrator for "Papiu" high-school, Romania. My job consisted of managing 3 servers (2 Samba servers + Novell and one Internet gateway) for ~60 workstations scattered throught the 4-storey building. I helped the school build a wired network infrastructure to get the network on every floor.

Awards / Contests

Newistic was one of the finalist teams at Mini Seedcamp Prague.

Part of one of the finalist teams at YEurope.

Part of one of the winning teams at ICUBE - Innovation Initiative Incubator.

"Papiu" prize for academic excellence.

Won 1st prize at several local computer projects contests.

Startups

Co-founder of Newistic.com, a startup working on large-scale web mining projects.

Co-Founder of Playfuls Entertainment. I had several roles in the company, starting from network administrator to programmer and team manager. Sold it in 2006 to Netbridge Investments (backed by New Century Holdings), remained as a technical consultant until 2007. The main website, playfuls.com, had 3 million visitors / month at its peak.

Peer Review

I helped review a paper for WSDM 2012

I helped review a paper for SPIRE 2011

I helped review a paper for KDD 2011

I helped review three papers for ICWSM 2011

I helped review two papers for WebQuality 2011

I helped review a paper for WSDM2011

I helped review a paper for SIGIR2010

I helped review a paper for ICWSM2010

I helped review a paper for WWW2010

Teaching / Talks

While I was an intern there, I gave three talks at AT&T Shannon Labs in Florham Park, NJ. Two were about previous research conducted at WUME, and one was about the research I completed during my internship there. Each talk was about half an hour.

I was one of the two trainers of a one week summer school in July 2008 about studying in the US. The goal was to inform high-school students of available undergraduate opportunities and to give practical advice on how to approach universities and fill out admission forms.

Taught an IT course during the Asian Human Rights Commission folkschool (human rights school). I discussed Internet-related technologies useful for human rights work. The course had a strong practical element to it.

I gave a talk on scaling web applications during the 2006 Forum IT Camp (link in Romanian). I presented the steps I took to gradually scale the Playfuls Entertainment news portals.

I taught PHP and Linux to two high-school classes at the "Unirea" high-school and at the "Petru Maior" University, both in Targu Mures, Romania.

Professional membership

Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Member of the SIGKDD Special Interest Group (KDD).

Volunteering

Along with Alexandra Coman, I organized the Lehigh Student Seminar, where students from Lehigh and other universities present their work on most Fridays at noon.

IT Director of the League of Romanian Students Abroad, an NGO with 3500 members and branches in 20+ countries.

VP Adjunct in the Projects Department of the League of Romanian Students Abroad