Sandra Newton, Ph.D.
443 845 8276
email: sn@rhl.com
_________________________________________________



Leadership and Technology Qualifications

Employment

2001 to Present RHL Consulting Principal Consultant

2000 to 2001 Lante Corporation Technology Principal

Reporting to the CTO, managed an engineering staff of 27 in eCommerce consulting engagements. Delivered technology solutions, engaging in significant client contact and engagement management. Contributor to technical strategy of the company.

1997 to 2000 RHL Consulting Principal Consultant

See above.


1995 to 1997 Bolt Baranak and Newman (BBN) Principal Consultant

Application and database consultant in the Science and Technology group at BBN. Managed project to enable the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to move to on-line 24x7 trading. Primary focus on implications of large databases and other applications running over WANs and LANs. Additional experience in moving from centralized mainframe systems to distributed client server systems. Expertise in the unique requirements of non-traditional data, such as text and image, and their roles in electronic commerce. Additional focus on security issues.


1994 to 1995 Bertelsmann Director of Strategic Architectures

Responsible for developing an architecture and standards for a worldwide presence on the Internet. Planned first entry to WorldWideWeb. Developed relationships with high-end production houses for long-term exploitation of the Internet. Began planning for development of artist's workbench and virtual artists' community of the future. Researched hardware and network issues, costs, and return on investment for new media. Provided bridge between technologists, artists, and business people, and served as technical liaison between US holdings (Dell, Bantam, Doubleday; BMG Music, etc.) and German corporate headquarters.


1993 Dialog Information Services Director of Applied Research

Responsible for evaluating and bringing in-house new technologies directly applicable to the information services industry as the company migrated from traditional mainframe to distributed client-server systems. Specifically focused on expanding business to include multimedia, and associated search and data visualization issues, using SGML to provide formatted text, voice and video. Launched a major joint development project with SRI International in Menlo Park to significantly increase the value of real-time newspaper feeds, by analyzing text for content. Liaison with Knight Ridders' Newspaper of the Future laboratory in Boulder.


1991 to 1992 DHL Airways Data Architect and Project Manager

Managed $3M project migrating from IBM mainframes to client-server distributed systems on RS600 machines. Project included modeling data using Bachmann toolkit to match core business needs, and MicroSoft Project. Redesigned call-center data access to increase productivity of help desk personel.


1988 to 1990 Independent Consultant Principal

Clients included large pharmaceutical company needing advanced data analysis to small PC-based companies requiring re-engineering of navigational systems and User Interface design.


1981 to 1987 IBM


1975 to 1981 Linguistics Research Center Senior Research Scientist, Metal Project

Faculty-level research scientist on machine translation project to aid in translation of text from German into English in the telecommunications field for Siemens Corporation. Developed case based system for noun classification. In a second, unrelated NL project, designed and built a relational database to handle textual data. Involved significant grammatical classification based on entries of an etymological dictionary.


1978 Intel Corporation Independent Consultant

Defined a model of database user class to aid in development of the query language QUEX. Involved original work for NSF in defining user types as well as mapping them into a particular mode of system interaction.


Projects Completed

Wireless:

Project to securely manage point of sale transactions via wireless devices. Application allowed platinum users to place secure orders on WAP phones (minimum hardware) or other wireless devices to order products. In addition to secure management of backend databases and user validation, this system successfully minimized server hits, a major consideration in all wireless applications. This project was implemented using Beck's Extreme Programming methodology, as well as Java, JavaBeans, etc.

Financial:

Evaluated corporate technology systems with regard to on-line trading for an international financial entity and proposed system that would enable secure on-line trades. Major emphasis on how to move from out of date hardware and software to platforms that would allow 7-24 secure transactions. Significant part of project involved corporate education as to what benefits and drawbacks are involved with new technologies.

Transportation:

Re-engineering of global tracking system for tracking shipments. Involved development project across several locations and technology platforms to update and modernize methods of tracking and management.

Global Rollouts:

Managed project to roll out purchasing software across a multi-national corporation. Major issue was coordinating staffs on three continents.

Manufacturing:

Project to use AI technology to minimize and reduce costs for maintenance of aircraft engines.

Non-traditional:

Cutting edge management of text, music, voice, and images for companies focused for content management. Strategic analysis of how to manage very large systems of non-traditional data for commercial benefit.

Education



MS, Computer Science; University of Texas at Austin
PhD, Linguistics; University of Texas at Austin
MA, Hindi; University of Texas at Austin
BA, German and Asian Studies; University of Texas at Austin

Publications

"Outsourcing Observations: a Report from the Field" White paper at RHL Consulting, January, 2006

"Technology Transfer in Software Development" Proceedings of the Seventh Annual International Conference on Cybernetics and Systems Research, Baden-Baden, Germany, August 12-18, 1991.

"Expert Systems: When They Don't Work" White Paper at Brown Bear Consulting.

"Expert Systems: Where to Start," Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics and Cybernetics, Baden-Baden, West Germany, 1988.

"The Query Management Facility: Some Results of Two-Pronged Testing," IBM Technical Report.

"The Use of the QBE Relational Database System for a Gothic Etymological Dictionary." Co-author Linn Johnk. Cybernetics and System Research, R. Trappl (ed) North-Holland Publishing Company, 1982, pp. 791-796.

"A Metric for the Evaluation of Query Languages" Co-author Margaret Ball. Working paper, Intel Systems Corporation. Austin, TX, 1981.