Projects involving Shawn . . .

In addition to system-administration, I design and implement web solutions (mostly involving HTML/PHP/Javascript) and have some experience developing iPhone applications. My philosophy is to ‘make it behave as you expect’  with the implemention specifically tailored, and evolutive with your needs.

System-administration at ARVE/EPFL

I am currently taking care of a small computer network of 3 OS X Servers (XServes) & 10 Clients at ENAC/EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of technology). I do everything from user-support and software maintenance/update, to configuration of AFP & NFS, wiki (Docuwiki and Apple wiki), Jahia, mailing-lists, file-backup/restore (BRU), purchasing & inventory (accred:Sesame), guest management IT (trouble-shooting Mac/Windows + access EnClair + config TCP/IP/wireless + hardware maintenance), development & administration of website (PHP/JQuery/Jahia/CSS), script development (bash, sh, R, (Python)), database administration (Postgres with PostGIS extension), software version control (CVS/Hg/Git), user profile mangement (Bash), SSH, VNC, VPC, social network presences (FB, YouTube, Twitter) and more. Learn more at arve.epfl.ch.

Website relooking for ARVE group

The functional website needed updating to follow the new graphic-line of the parent institution. I first built a solution in integrating into the school’s Jahia CMS, but ended up using PHP and Javascript.

• Google Analytics are included across all pages
• Video-pages use Flash (integrated with YouTube) and are mobile-sensitive to fall-back to HTML where required

PHP, CCS, JavaScript, JQuery

Automated data-summary for Google-Maps

The goal was to build a simplified web-app (beta) to view schematic climate-diagrams generated on-the-fly from public-access databases.

• Multi-level zoom progressively allows more (or less) of the stations to be displayed
• Location-based searching, and parametrized url allows bookmarking and social-sharing
• Manage your favorite stations
• Access the raw data and the statistical summary results
• Get help using an interactive help-system

sh, Awk, PostgreSQL and PL/PGSQL, GMT, Googlemap API v3, Flickr API, Facebook API, curl

Data-mining and statistical-analysis

The climate researchers at EPFL wanted a better parameterization of their weather-generator. By developing database queries and stored procedures in PostgreSQL, and scripting the statistical analysis in R, I helped to improve the simulation of daily precipitation, temperature, and solar radiation.

• Use curve-fitting to parameterize the gamma distribution function, and quadratic equations
• Translate the math results into Fortran code
• Create visually compelling graphs suitable for publication

R, PostgreSQL, PL/PgSQL, PostGIS, Fortran, sh, awk

e-Learning web-tool

I developed the rhl-ebm.org e-learning website to answer a need at WHO (World Health Organization)  for a new comparitive learning tool for 2008-2010. The goal was to provide a platform to evaluate alternative methods for teaching doctors. The website continues to be used by doctors in over 5 countries and 4 languages.

• Ruby on Rails based (with a MySQL database)
• Secure login and tracking of student behavior
• Uses an MVC architecture
• Incorporates video, Powerpoint, Word documents
• 3-tier structure of user and administrator rights

Multi-national European medical database

The European Group of Robotic Urology needed a tool to share data and statistics between surgeons and to compare the results of their robotic surgery interventions. I customed-designed and built the multi-tabbed database currently being used at EGRU.ch to do this and to generate real-time statistics ready to be imported directly into the conference presentations. To date, the EGRU database (called EGRUdb) manages more than 8000 patient files in 5 countries.

• PHP, MySQL, Javascript, CSS, and AJAX
• Secure login, and fault-tolerance tracking
• Administration interface for data-cleaning
• Preservation of anonymity
• Automatic .pdf generation in 3 languages (patient-forms)

Multi-national medical-database

Managing thousands of medical measurements across hundreds of hospitals and clinics in 3rd-world countries was time-consuming and error-prone before I made the IBCT database and web front-end available. To date, the various databases managed by IBCT include over 200,000 patient files.

• PHP, MySQL, Javascript, CSS, and AJAX
• Remotely administered on the Geneva University Hospital Apache server
• Secure login, auditing, and fault-tolerance tracking
• Administration interface for managing users and data-access rights
• Online dynamic statistics of current data snapshot
• To date, has successfully managed over 200,000 patient files

Google-like image-search database

Google image-search can certainly help find the medical images related to your specific search criteria, but we wanted to leverage our own Excel-based data resources. I helped manage and then maintained and extended a 2-man project that does just that. Two databases were the result ‘Developmental and genetic diseases‘ (here) and ‘Medical Images‘ (here).

• maintenance & development in PHP, MySQL
• Administrator panel with secure interface
• Import and Export scripts to integrate with Excel-sheet formats

Other projects

Ask me about these older projects:

• Serocytol web forum (PHP, MySQL)
• Medical Health-research Forum (PHP, MySQL)
• XLS2MySQL database generator (PHP, MySQL)
• Medical CMS/e-learning (Moodle, PHP, MySQL)
• e-Government Java application for Swiss driver’s licenses (Moodle, PHP, MySQL)
• Intranet development (Lotus Notes and Oracle v8)
• Pychological testing applications
• Volumetric-space visualisation