Ilya Boyandin

MSc Computer Science, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, 2003
Thesis title: Statistical Query Transformations for Question Answering in the Web
Supervisor: Igor Nekrestyanov
Summary: Evaluated the quality of query transformations generated by an algorithm based on the QASM model on a corpus of correct natural-language questions and developed an improvement for the algorithm achieving better quality (improvement was higher than 5% in 92% of test cases). A paper was published in RCDL'03.

• Developing JFlowMap, an experimental tool for the visualization of spatial interactions (e.g. migrations). The implemented techniques include force-directed edge bundling and hierarchical node clustering.
• Contributing to the BirdEye visualization library developed at the UN Centre for Advanced Visual Analytics. Making the animated graph layouts from the previous library version work within the new framework based on the Grammar of Graphics.
• Working as an assistant in a university course on XML technologies, tutoring, preparing materials and building the course website.
• Developing a webapp with (randomly generated) exercises for the students on XML, XSLT, and SVG and with the ability to run a competition and see the students' ranking updating in real-time.
• Helping to organize and tutoring in workshops on programming and computer graphics for students and school children.

• Responsible for the design and development of a web application for collaborative collection and consolidation of study- and research-relevant data by the university employees and providing a statistical overview. The data model allowed the administrators to define what kind of data was collected depending on the occupations of the employees.
• Designed and developed a web application used by the students, lecturers and employees of the university for the online administration. Usability was the main concern and the feedback from the users was very positive.

• Designed and developed a generic visualization tool for multidimensional data which facilitates hierarchical clustering, zooming and animation to help the users to explore their datasets. The tool is now freely available under GPL at http://code.google.com/p/cgvis.
• Designed and developed a standalone and a web version of a proteomic data classification tool which implements a data reduction algorithm developed at the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics (TU Graz) and uses SVM for the subsequent sample classification. The tool achieves 99% classification accuracy on the NCI Cancer SELDI-TOF study dataset. Both the standalone and the web versions are available at the IGB web site.
• Participated in the development of a presentation management tool. Developed the visual layout editor (which allows users to arrange their multimedia objects on the screen) and the schedule editor (similar to calendar in Outlook).
• Improved the implementation of an algorithm detecting the type of behaviour of a user looking at a web page (skimming, reading, searching, or learning) on the fly based on the real-time eye-tracking data. Implemented a real-time visualization of the web page reading process.
• Migrated the AdeLE project web site from static HTML to XML and XSLT using a self-developed Java XSLT-engine.

• Participated in the development of a web based treasury system for Deutsche Bahn and Commerzbank.
• Implemented the Java infrastructure and XSLT stylesheets for the runtime generation of the front end UI code from XML sources.
• Evaluated and optimized the performance of the XSL transformations.
• Implemented support for long running jobs on the server-side of the system.
• Developed the context-sensitive help for the system and the help authoring infrastructure based on DocBook.

• Worked in the Sun's Java Swing UI library maintenance team. Was responsible for fixing bugs and implementing requests for enhancements in the button classes (JButton, JRadioButton, JCheckBox, etc). Fixed a total of about 50 bugs.

• Designed and developed an eCommerce system with user authentication and authorization, order tracking, credit card processing, back-office, inventory, statistical reports, etc. Developed the whole system from scratch, supported and customized it constantly adapting it to the changing needs of the employer. The system is still in use.

• Participated in the development of a system of intelligent agents capable of chatting to visitors of a website in a natural language and promoting its products. Implemented a highly dynamic web-interface for the subsystem that controlled the chats and let operators intervene in a chat if a bot was in trouble.

• Taught school children programming.

Languages #1: Java, PHP, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, XSLT
Languages #2: ActionScript, Scala, Perl, Python, C
APIs/Libs: Swing, SWT, Wicket, Spring, Hibernate, Servlets/JSP, JDBC, Flex, jQuery
Databases: MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle

Visualizing the World’s Refugee Data with JFlowMap, Ilya Boyandin, Enrico Bertini, Denis Lalanne.
Poster Abstract at Eurographics/IEEE-VGTC Symposium on Visualization, Bordeaux, France, June 2010.

Using Flow Maps to Explore Migrations Over Time, Ilya Boyandin, Enrico Bertini, Denis Lalanne.
Workshop in Geospatial Visual Analytics: Focus on Time (GeoVA(t)), Guimarães, Portugal, May 2010.

Statistical Query Transformations for Question Answering in the Web (in Russian), Ilya Boyandin, Igor Nekrestyanov.
Fifth Russian Conference on Digital Libraries (RCDL'2003), St. Petersburg, Russia, October 2003.
slides (in English)

• In 2003 I participated in the organization of the Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar (ROMIP) and made a Java XSLT-engine for the web site of the seminar which is still in active use.
• In 2002 I developed phpObjectForms, an open-source library for building nice and user-friendly web based UI without the need of writing HTML code. The library was then downloaded more than 10000 times.
• Participation in several developers' conferences: JavaPolis 2007, Devoxx 2008/2009, and Scala Days 2010.

• Russian (mother tongue)
• English (fluent)
• German (fluent)
• French (basic knowledge)

Photography, composing (music), travelling.