bradford boyle

Bradford D. Boyle

I am a software engineer working on big data platforms in Palo Alto, CA. For my Ph.D., I worked on problems involving combinatorial optimization, mutltiterminal information theory, and networking.

CV

Current as of November 2023

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Industry Experience

vmware, inc.

VMware, Inc. formerly Pivotal Software, Inc.

  • Title: Staff Engineer
  • Location: Palo Alto, CA
  • Duration: October 2016 to present
  • Research & design engineer for Greenplum Database, an open-source massively parallel processing data platform based on PostgreSQL and designed to manage large scale analytic data warehouses & business intelligence workloads
  • Developed Scala-based connector for Apache Spark (a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing) to provide high speed, parallel data transfer between Greenplum & Spark clusters
  • Maintained & extended Java-based connector for Apache Geode (a data management platform that provides real-time, consistent access to data-intensive applications through distributed cloud architectures) to provide high speed, parallel data transfer between Greenplum and Geode clusters
  • Improved Greenplum installation packages for Debian & RedHat-based Linux operating systems
    • Updated packages to support installing multiple major versions of Greenplum to facilitate in-place upgrades
    • Re-architected continuous integration & deployment (CI/CD) pipelines in support of Greenplum 6
    • Maintained release pipelines for three major versions of Greenplum (4.3, 5, 6), averaging one release per week
  • Provisioned & maintained in-house CI/CD systems based on Concourse CI
    • Provisioned infrastructure as a service (IaaS) resources across multiple public cloud providers using Terraform
    • Deployed over a dozen CI/CD systems with Cloud Foundry Bosh
    • Tuned CI/CD pipelines in collaboration with other teams for lower build times & cost savings
  • Member of operations committee for PgDay SF 2020 & 2021 (one-day, single-track Postgres community conference), responsible for conference website and day-of-conference logistics
  • Facilitated quarterly team health assessments to help gauge psychological safety & identify non-technical challenges
  • Presented at PostgresOpen SV 2018 ([video] [slides])
sift security

Sift Security

  • Title: Data Scientist & Developer
  • Location: Menlo Park, CA
  • Duration: September 2015 to October 2016
  • Stealth mode enterprise security startup combining big data technologies, graph databases, and machine learning
  • Contributed to the development of an ingestion pipeline utilizing Kafka, Spark, and HBase/Cassandra
  • Facilitated the implementation of detection algorithms on a variety of data sources driven by security use-cases
  • Member of a small team of developers in an Agile environment & served as scrum master
  • Engaged with and supported pilot customers in deploying, utilizing, and leveraging Sift Security's platform
  • Managed company infrastructure using AWS, LDAP, JIRA, GitLab, and Jenkins
cisco

Cisco Systems, Inc

  • Title: Software Engineer (Software Defined Networking Agent (SDNA) Graduate Intern)
  • Location: Boxborough, MA
  • Duration: June 2012 to September 2012
  • Ported Open vSwitch to the Nexus 7000 line of switches to provide a proof-of-concept Openflow compatible Nexus 7000
  • Developed a POX-based Openflow controller to demonstrate correct handling of flow rules and packet handling on the proof-of-concept Nexus 7000 Openflow agent
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Publications

Journals

  1. J. Ren, B. D. Boyle, G. Ku, S. Weber, and J. M. Walsh, "Overhead Performance Tradeoffs—A Resource Allocation Perspective," IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 62, no. 6, Jun. 2016
    [arXiv:1408.3661]
  2. B.D. Boyle and J. Ren, J. M. Walsh, and S. Weber, "Interactive Scalar Quantization for Distributed Resource Allocation," IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 64, no. 5, Mar. 2016
    [arXiv:1505.04202]

Conferences

  1. B. D. Boyle and S. Weber, "Primal-Dual Characterizations of Jointly Optimal Transmission Rate and Scheme for Distributed Sources," Data Compression Conf. (DCC), March 2014
    [paper] [expanded version] [slides]
  2. B. D. Boyle, J. M. Walsh, and S. Weber, "Distributed Scalar Quantizers for Subband Allocation," Conf. Information Sciences and Systems (CISS), March 2014
    [paper] [slides]
  3. J. Hummel, A. McDonald, V. Shah, R. Singh, B. D. Boyle, T. Huang, N. Kandasamy, H. Sethu, and S. Weber, "A Modular Multi-Location Anonymized Traffic Monitoring Tool for a WiFi Network," ACM Conf. Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY) (Outstanding Poster Award), March 2014
    [paper] [poster]
  4. B. D. Boyle, J. M. Walsh, and S. Weber, "Channel Dependent Adaptive Modulation and Coding Without Channel State Information at the Transmitter," IEEE Int. Conf. Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 2013
    [paper] [poster] [expanded version]
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Research Projects

nsf

Mining Large Graphs Through Subgraph Sampling

  • Investigators: Harish Sethu and Steven Weber
  • Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF) Program for Big Data Science & Engineering, Award # 1250786
  • Duration: October 2013 to August 2015
nsf

Securing the Wireless Philadelphia Network

  • Investigators: Steven Weber, Kapil Dandekar, Spiros Mancoridis, and Harish Sethu
  • Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF) Program for Secure & Trustworthy Cyberspace, Award # 1228847
  • Duration: September 2012 to August 2015
afosr

Overhead-Performance Tradeoffs in Distributed Wireless Networks

  • Investigators: John MacLaren Walsh, Steven Weber, Leonard J. Cimini, and Javier Garcia-Frias
  • Sponsor: Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Award # FA9550-12-1-0086
  • Duration: May 2012 to May 2015
cecom

Cognitive Networking

  • Investigators: Steven Weber and Kapil Dandekar
  • Sponsor: U.S. Army Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM)
  • Duration: September 2010 to May 2012
cerdec

CREW Network Centric Operations

  • Investigators: Moshe Kam, Kapil Dandekar, and John MacLaren Walsh
  • Sponsor: U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC)
  • Duration: June 2008 to September 2010
darpa

Situation-Aware Protocols in Edge Network Technologies (SAPIENT)

  • Investigators: Moshe Kam and Spiros Mancoridis
  • Sponsor: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL)
  • Duration: September 2006 to June 2008
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Collaborators

Faculty

Students

  • Jeffrey Wildman, Drexel University, Modeling and Analysis of Networks Lab
  • Ray Canzanese, Drexel University, Data Fusion Lab
  • Jie Ren, Drexel University, Adaptive Signal Processing and Information Theory Research Group
  • Gwanmo Ku, Drexel University, Adaptive Signal Processing and Information Theory Research Group
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© Bradford D. Boyle 2011 – 2023