Quad Erat Demonstratum

Alan Commike, Director of Engineering.

Education

M.S., Computer Science, University at Buffalo,1991

B.S., Computer Science, University at Buffalo, 1989

Positions and Honors

  • 1988 – 1991: Research Associate, Department of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo, Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition. Research on unconstrained off-line handwriting recognition.
  • September 1991 – September 1995:  Software Engineer, Landmark Graphics. Design and implementation of an underlying framework for oil exploration software.
  • September 1995 – November 2000: Senior Engineer, Applications Consulting Engineering, Silicon Graphics Inc. Optimization and differentiation of top tier independent software vendor application code. Project planning and technical guidance for a group of 5 engineers.
  • November 2000 – May 2001: Technical Lead, Advanced Systems Division, SGI. Member of a four person team responsible for industry wide acceptance of OpenGL. Key job activities included proposing and implementing new language features, representing SGI at Architecture Review Board (ARB) meetings, performance tuning for SGI specific hardware, and evangelizing OpenGL through published papers, conference talks, and courses.
  • September 1998 – present: Director of Engineering, QED Labs. Development of icosahedral virus structure determination software. Developed a software architecture that is used as the basis for all QED Labs products. Responsible for directing the software development efforts, choosing key technologies, and determining future directions for software architectures and products.
  • July 2002 – December 2004: Visualization Technologies Lead, Applications Engineering, SGI. Responsible for setting the direction the Applications Engineering group takes with respect to visualization and graphics. Provide input into SGI's visualization and graphics product roadmaps.  
  • December 2004 – present: Principle Engineer, SGI.  Responsible for setting the technical direction of the graphics and visualization product line for SGI.  This includes developing new technologies as well as enhancing existing technologies for both the hardware and software products.

Publications

  1. A. Commike and J. Hull (1991).  Syntactic pattern classification by branch and bound search, Proceedings of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference, 438 – 443.
  2.  A. Commike (1994). Color management for integrated application suites with multiple executables. Proceedings of the X Technical Conference, 35 – 38.
  3. A. Commike and S. Senften (1997). Hardware assisted volume rendering for oil and gas exploration. Visual Proceedings of SIGGRAPH, 194.
  4. A. Commike (1998). Using large memory in 32-bit applications. Developer News, Silicon Graphics Developer Program, March/April 2 – 7.
  5. K. Cok, A. Commike, B. Kuene, and T. True (1999). Developing efficient graphics software, ACM SIGGRAPH 1999 Course Proceedings.
  6. A. Commike, B. Grantham, B. Kuehne, and D. Shreiner (2003). Performance OpenGL, ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 Course Proceedings.
  7. A. Commike, T. True, B. Kuehne, and D. Shreiner (2005). Performance OpenGL, ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Course Proceedings.

Patents

  • Method and System for Using Scalable Graphics to Stream High Resolution Imagery.  B. Grantham, D. Schreiner and A. Commike
     Patent Pending No. 60603721.