University of Calgary

Head of Ad Optimization and Data Engineering at Healthline Media

I lead the effort to restructure Healthline Media's ad stack in order to optimize programmatic ad yield and to extract greater intelligence from our ad traffic. This involves implementing a header bidder container, adding of new ad partners, organizing and segmenting the data received from the various systems and build out an analytics platform for the programmatic ad yield team.

Healthline Media

Head of Ad Optimization and Data Engineering

I lead engineering in the the programmatic advertising group within IAC.  We built a platform that uses data science and machine learning to increase ad yield for a portfolio of digital publisher that is owned and operated by IAC.  We give our digital publishers greater insights into the ad performance of their traffic, enhanced revenue reporting, PMP analysis, market intelligence for direct sales and more importantly superior ad yield as measured by eCPM growth.

VP of Engineering - Programmatic Advertising

GOOD44 is a place to buy and sell specialty foods, health and wellness product. GOOD44 is a subscription retail, self-service marketplace where merchants set-up shops and activate a community of passionate customers.  We support the bottoms up economy, the great network of small and medium sized businesses producing a truly great food, health and wellness product.

Good44 Inc

Rhythm New Media connects brand advertisers with highly engaged mobile audiences by selling and serving video, rich media and other immersive advertising formats.

•	Primary responsibility for the operation data group is management of the data warehouse, data analytics, adhoc reporting, predictive analytics, ETL processing, and inventory forecasting.
•	Manage the transition of a data mining platform from using a traditional data warehouse system running on Oracle to one that is built on Hive, hadoop and Cassandra.
•	Managed the team that design and implement an inventory forecasting system using the Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing forecasting technique.
•	Lead a team to design and implement a new reporting/analytics platform using Kafka, Cassandra, Mysql and Jaspersoft.
•	Manage the process of replacing a traditional data warehouse system in Oracle to a new big data system using Hive and Hadoop.
• 	Managed the upgrade of all Oracle databases in the environment from 10g to 11g.
•	Reorganized existing ETL process to allow log files to be processed multiple times a day.
•	Performed proof of concept using HDFS and Cassandra as solution to replace BerkeleyDB in the ad server.

Rhythm NewMedia

Head of Data Operations

• Optimize  and tune slow running queries in a OLTP database running Oracle 10g.
• Performed performance tuning on the daily ETL process.
• Performed proof of concept on using Hadoop as a platform for ETL processing.
• Performed research on using Hadoop and Flume as a way to efficiently collect data for processing.

Consultant

AquaFold, Inc. markets an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for database query, administration and development. It supports all major database vendors, works on multiple operating systems and is localized for over 20 languages. 

•Responsible for the AquaOpenAPI project that is part of the Aqua Data Studio 9.0 release.  The OpenAPI offers developers a way to access the AquaDataStudio's capabilities via AquaScripts that are based on JavaScript.
•AquaDataServer.  As one of the architects on this project, we built an application server that specifically targets Enterprise users.  The server software provides a software framework that implements the Aqua Open API library for ETL, Reporting and Data Analysis.  This product provides a universal framework for building custom functionality for database applications.
http://www.aquafold.com/aquadataserver.html

AquaFold

The Nile Project provides online travel planning services. It offers online travel planning tools, which enable travelers to discover the destinations and finds local attractions and events.

•	Implemented an agile development process that increased the frequency of releases from 3 times a year to once every 2 weeks.
•	Manage Nile Project’s distributed engineering teams in San Francisco and Kharkov, Ukraine.
•	Mange Nile Project’s QA team in Kharkov, Ukraine
•	Defined all engineering services and process.
•	Headed up technical operations and IT.
•	Define product management procedures and processes.

NileGuide.com

VP of Engineering

Brijit Inc., is an online media aggregator providing 100 word abstracts across 100+ media sources. http://www.brijit.com was featured in Wired, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, The Atlantic, MSNBC, TechCrunch

•	Designed the entire system from ground up.  This includes the back end CMS, consumer facing site, RSS/Email submissions, javascript and facebook widgets.
•	Recruited and built the engineering team in Beijing, China (5 engineers) and Sunnyvale, California (2 software engineers).
•	Defined all engineering services and process.
•	Define product requirements and planned all aspect of the development lifecycle.

Brijit

YouSendIt is a web-based digital content delivery service. It lets users send, receive and track files on-demand. It is an alternative to sending large email attachments, using FTP, and sending CDs or other soild media type via courier. 

•	I was initially hired to resolve performance issues on a system with over 1 million+ user sessions and 40 terabytes of data transfer a day. 
•	Set up Yousendit’s out source development center in Shanghai, China and Noida, India.
•	Manage the knowledge transfer and ramp up of the 2 out source development teams.
•	Develop resource estimates and budget for all development efforts. 
•	Define product requirements, plan and staff projects across functional groups both internal and external to the organization.
•	Help define the product road map and define the technical architecture to fit the vision of the product.

YouSendIt

Director of Engineering

Searchparty is hotel meta search engine.  It allows users perform price and policy comparison between different online travel agencies.  The company was acquired by Farecast Inc., in 2006 and is now part of http://www.bing.com (Microsoft).  

•	Manage Search Party's global technology teams in both Mountain View and Beijing.
•	Design a XML API service for external customers to access Search Party's rate engine. 
•	Designed and implemented a high availability, 24x7 production environment for hotel rate comparison. 
•	Responsible for resource estimates and budget planning for all development projects.
•	Develop the infrastructure to support using open source technology to reduce cost in the operation of the system.
•	Direct and execute the product road map.
•	Provide technical leadership to the developers in Mountain View and Beijing.
•	Manage key supplier relationships.

search party inc

Co-founder

Worldres Inc is one of the very first travel website with a focus only on hotels reservations.  I designed the system that generated $300m in hotel reservations a year. 

•	Manage Worldres's global system development team.
•	Manage the engineering services group that includes QA, CM and Data Services. 
•	Re-engineered the system to use a Service Oriented Architecture using a PHP front end and a java based web services/SOAP back end.
•	Design a SOAP/XML API service for external customers to access the central reservation engine.
•	Identify and direct the execution of the product road map and architecture.
•	Develop resource estimates and budget for major development projects. 
•	Define product requirements, plan and staff projects across functional groups both internal and external to the organization. 
•	Direct product development processes and product development life cycle.

WorldRes

Designed and implemented a high availability, 24x7 production environment for on line transaction processing. 

•	Provided technical leadership in the development of application requirements and specifications.  Collaborated with technical and non-technical staff to gather requirements.
•	Designed and developed the core, UNIX based, reservation engine for an Internet based hotel central reservations system. 
•	Worked with development team to coordinate reservation engine integration with various system components in both NT and UNIX environments. 
•	Provided the future technical direction for the company. 
•	Established adviser to several industry related organizations.

System Architect / Director of Engineering

•	Designed and developed the first pilot of the web site www.placestostay.com.
•	Designed and developed a fully automated web site which enabled hoteliers to enroll themselves on the system.
•	Developed various support systems to ensure notification of reservations via email and/or fax.

Allan Chan