Andrew W. MacDonald

Experience

• Managed a team of 12 developers and analysts producing all tools which Amazon.com uses to plan inventory purchases, transfers and returns by product. These cover 80% of the retail revenue of a $3 billion company with dozens of product lines over five countries.
• Advised and guided senior corporate management in formulating inventory management strategies.
• Liased with management in retail and operations organizations to translate corporate vision into technical requirements and business processes.
• Guided architectural development of inventory forecasting and planning tools by senior team members, including development of stochastic algorithms for optimizing purchasing decisions.
• Set objectives for team members; managed and tracked execution of those objectives.
• Tracked performance of production systems, ensuring team met service level agreements to customers regarding calculation accuracy and system uptime.
• Recruited top-flight technical talent to grow team and replace attrition.

• Designed and developed the Predictive Buying Service (PBS), a tool for calculating purchase order quantities to maintain optimal inventory levels.
• Built calculation engine to implement a Distribution Requirements Planning algorithm.
• Designed and built supporting services to retrieve inventory, purchase order and demand forecasting information over a WLE interface, using Oracle database as source data.

• Designed and implemented applets and websites for clients' public and internal use, using Java, ASP, CGI, and Oracle.
• Clients include Abbott Labs, Total Quality Stats, Inc., and Anderson Consulting (now Accenture).

• Managed a team of six software developers building a virtual reality Engine. Specified the size and requirements for the team, recruited the employees, supervised their work.
• Negotiated and managed relationships between VictorMaxx and third party consultants and suppliers.
• Architected virtual reality Engine for creating high quality games and simulations. The Engine includes 3D graphics and sound, mouse, keyboard and joystick control, multiple network interfaces, an object database and an application interface.
• Supervised software design for Autoduel, a networked, multi-player, VR game based on Steve Jackson Games' Car Wars board game. (Autoduel is the first application of the Engine.)
• Implemented efficient network interfaces for maintaining a distributed database of the virtual environment with maximum consistency and reliability.

• Analyzed requirements and produced architecture for Dynamic Terrain extensions for the Defense Department's Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS).

• Designed and developed Demiurge, a virtual world creation and interaction tool which supports true six degree-of-freedom navigation with fully three-dimensional texture-mapped objects on a 80486-based PC. Wrote all code for 3D transformation, clipping, texture mapping and scan conversion. Written in C and assembly.

• Responsible for system integration and non-display I/O for IWI's flagship product, a multiple-participant exercise experience designed for health clubs.
• Designed and implemented all non-display peripheral interface software (network, trackers and exercise equipment) and interfaced with 3D graphics generator.
• Built an application development environment and implemented demonstration applications for treadmills and recumbent bicycles.

• Co-invented the Participant System concept for interfacing users to virtual reality systems.
• Implemented three versions of Mercury, the world's first participant system, which at the time was one of the world's fastest and lowest latency immersive virtual reality interfaces.
• Co-designed and developed the HITLab's Virtual Environment Operating System (VEOS), a distributed, heterogeneous database and programming environment for virtual world development.
• Integrated commercial and proprietary sensors and displays into the VEOS system.
• Led the Movement Group to investigate techniques for navigating virtual environments.

• Programmed data acquisition hardware and display, tape and disk drivers as a member of a team developing a real-time, embedded, ultrasonic coronary artery surgery system.

Education

• Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with Computer Science.
• GPA: 4.0/5.0