Kirkman Enterprises

While other students on campus have been studying hard for finals this past week, I have been relaxing and catching up on unfinished business.  Thanks to my classes this semester being project classes I'm all done.  There has been a project at work I had been delaying on to finish my class projects.  (And yes, contrary to some people's beliefs, I am employed by the University doing actual work.)  The professor I work for is not looking to replace me with another computer science student who can continue to do software development for him.  As a result, he has been hesitant to start any new projects that requires heavy programming.  Instead, I've been tasked with creating videos of the various projects we have been working on during the last two years.  These videos serve to help demonstrate our research, educate future people in the research lab, and might also serve as an example of the work I've been doing over the last two years.

I've updated my page about the research (Manufacturing Service Description Language) to add these five videos.  These videos include a tour of the MSDL ontology using the Protege ontology editor, a demonstration of the MSDL Search Engine (which I designed and developed) in action, a tour of a subset of the search engine Java code that performs feature based similarity calculations, a demonstration of a multi-agent system (also designed and developed by me) utilizing the search engine and MSDL ontology, and finally, a demonstration of a related project, the "Feature Recognition - Machine Tool Selection" project.  I still have one more video to create providing a tour of the Manufacturing Marketplace, a web-based application that allows manufacturing suppliers and their potential customers to connect; it also utilizes the MSDL search engine.

I'm also going to be updating my portfolio of work page.  I have some reports from this semester's projects to put up and I'm still striving to find the final paper from my Software Quality class.  I'm still looking for full-time work away from academia.  I'll leave my gripes about employment recruiters to my previous post, but there are a few out there who do seem to pay attention, though even fewer who seem to be able to follow through with actual connections to employers or let me know why I'm not moving further along.  There was an interesting article in the Austin American Statesman about the lack of software developers.  I'll leave that for a future post.