dimelab dimelab: shrinking the gap between talk and action.

Biography of Alan S. Rojer, Ph.D.

Alan S. Rojer has been privileged to work in a variety of technology settings for the last quarter century, including digital media processing, financial analytics, regulatory arbitrage, computational neuroscience, and energy systems engineering. In all these settings, Rojer was a prolific provider of original software; to his mild regret, all his output prior to 2001 was work-for-hire, owned by others. In 2001, Rojer founded Dimelab, with the intent to create software and other products that he has long desired to have for his own use.

1 Dimelab

Rojer founded Dimelab in 2001. He set out to provide software and other products to facilitate analysis, tranformation, and synthesis of digital media, especially on open-source platforms including Linux. Rojer soon determined that his efforts were inhibited by the lack of tools for systematic collection and presentation of complex, highly structured information.

2 Duck/ON2

Prior to founding Dimelab, Rojer spent about four years ON2 Technologies, formerly known as the Duck Corporation. Rojer spearheaded video compression research and development. Rojer provided the last generation of encoder for the TrueMotion product line. Rojer then headed an advanced R&D effort at Duck, leading a peak staff of five researchers. The advanced R&D effort concentrated on applications of computer graphics technology (especially subdivision meshes) to video encoding. Rojer also explored techniques and applications for motion compensation incorporating motion segmentation.

3 Wall Street

Before joining Duck, Rojer worked in several positions providing development of software for financial analytics. Rojer was employed variously by Bear Stearns, Sumitomo Bank Capital Markets, and Lehman Brothers. Rojer's work concentrated on portfolio financial analytics. He provided a variety of software tools to facilitate computation on heterogeneous portfolios, including Rojer also provided a comprehensive design, including requirements and specifications, for a fixed-income portfolio analytics application which incorporated sophisticated return attribution methodology for index-based evaluation of portfolio strategies.

4 Other Work Experience

Prior to working on Wall Street, Rojer provided software for analysis of EEG data for a biomedical startup. Rojer also provided software for regulatory arbitrage for compliance with federal corporate average fleet efficiency (CAFE) regulation for a major domestic auto manufacturer, as well as software for for slicing and dicing consumer product purchase data for a market research data provider. Before returning to full-time Ph. D. study, Rojer was employed for three years by Stone and Webster Engineering Corp., since absorbed by The Shaw Group, Inc, where he performed engineering and financial computations related to energy systems engineering. Rojer also built, in the early 80's, a IBM-PC application to assist in selection of hearing aids.

5 Education and Registrations

Rojer attended Cornell University, obtaining in 1981 a B.A. in Biological Sciences from the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the College of Engineering. Rojer was an enthusiastic student, accumulating over five years of undergraduate study well over 200 course credits, compared to the 120 credit requirement for a bachelor's degree. In addition to his earned majors, Rojer completed most of the required coursework for majors in Engineering Physics and Geology.

While employed full-time at Stone and Webster, Rojer obtained in 1983 a masters in computer science at Steven Institute of Technology.

Rojer returned to full-time computer science study in 1984 at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He was fortunate to study computational neuroscience and machine vision under Eric L. Schwartz. Rojer earned the Ph. D. in 1990; his dissertation was titled Space-variant computer vision with a complex-logarithmic sensor geometry. Rojer's work under Schwartz led to the publication of about a dozen academic papers.

Rojer passed the US Patent Bar Examination in Spring, 2001, qualifying to practice before the US PTO as a registered Agent. His registration number is 48,792. Rojer also qualified as an Engineer in Training (EIT) in New York in the early 80's. Rojer is a member of the ACM, the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and the NAPP.

6 Community Service

Rojer serves as a member of the board of directors of Auricle Corporation, a non-profit 501c corporation which supervises the operations of WFMU, the superlative free-form radio station.