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 Russian-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.

• Designed and developed a generic data visualization tool with a zoomable graphical user interface which facilitates hierarchical clustering and animations to help the users to explore their datasets.
• 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). 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 elements on the screen) and the schedule editor (similar to calendar in Outlook).
• Migrated the AdeLE project web site from static HTML to XML and XSLT.

• Participated in the development of a treasury system for Deutsche Bahn and Commerzbank. Implemented the infrastructure and XSLT stylesheets for the generation of the frontend HTML 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 system and the help authoring infrastructure based on DocBook.

• Worked in the Sun's Java Swing 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.
• I made a part of the system - a small library for generation and validation of HTML forms - an open-source project and hosted it at SourceForge as phpObjectForms. The library was then downloaded about 9000 times.

• 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. The Web-interface used HTTP push to communicate with the server.

• Taught school children programming in C.

Languages: Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, C, HTML, XSLT, SQL
APIs/Libs: Spring, Swing, SWT, Eclipse GEF, Saxon, Prototype
Software: Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, Subversion, Bugzilla, Ant, JUnit, YourKit Profiler, Firebug, Apache, Tomcat, JBoss
Databases: MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle

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