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Canadian Work Permit
United States Citizen
Current Professional Interest
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Program manager and (co)developer of many of the MathWorks Toolboxes related to system identification, optimization, and controls, seeks full-time employment in Vancouver or Toronto/Mississauga areas in engineering, financial modeling/investing, or engineering management involving optimization, system identification, simulation, graphical user interface design/implementation, and/or control system design/analysis.
Summary of Qualifications
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* 10+ years scientific software management experience with proven record of producing profitable quality products
* Excellent presentation and training skills in corporate, consulting, and academic, environments
* 16+ years optimization experience in a broad range of applications
(including hydrogen powered engines, aircraft, defense, finance, and paper production) using a wide array of techniques (including gradient based methods, Monte Carlo methods, genetic algorithms, optimal closed form solutions, neural nets, and fuzzy logic)
* Some personnel management experience including extensive job candidate interviewing
* Experienced teacher at both university and high school levels
Professional Experience
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Hydrogenics Corporation, Mississauga, ON
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Simulation program manager (contract)
February 2004 - August 2004
Outlined roadmap for technical analysis program. Modeled electrochemical reactions, engine airflows, thermodynamic cooling system, and electromechanical components of hydrogen powered (PEM fuel cell) engines. Identified fuel cell power module parameters. Designed and optimized engine control systems for performance and efficiency within hybrid electric vehicles (HEV)applications.
Optimal Methods, Hong Kong and Massachusetts
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Founder and President
January 1998 - December 2003
Performed MATLAB consulting and training and developed MATLAB products.
Consulting specialty in optimization, system identification and modeling, simulation, control, and GUI design. International clientele included
Noranda of Canada, The MathWorks of the USA, the U.S. military, and a large multinational investment house in Hong Kong. Conducted training sessions in South Korea, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Sweden, and the USA.
Primary customer in year 2000: International Technologies (Burlington, MA,
USA). As de facto technical director advised owner/president on technical aspects of current products and prospective future products, communicated customer needs to outside developers, provided technical support to customers, and assisted in sales funneling.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, HK
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Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Visiting Scholar
January 1996 - December 1997
Managed development of a MATLAB Toolbox for multirate system analysis, control, and filtering. Coordinated software development of two other toolbox principals, a postdoc, and two graduate students. Prioritized design goals, estimated budget, and wrote and presented funding proposals.
Helped negotiate royalty arrangements and developed marketing/distribution strategy. Designed graphical user interfaces using paper prototyping methods.
The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, MA, USA
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June 1992 - December 1995
Program manager of engineering software products for the controls market generating over US$5 million per year in combined new product sales.
Visioned a direction for the company's half dozen controls related software products. Communicated and championed that vision to over a dozen external developers from around the world. Coordinated QA and Beta testing, and reviewed marketing collateral and user's guides. Conducted periodic controls product information sessions for sales force. Interviewed job candidates for controls, optimization, and simulation related positions.
Project manager and principal investigator for version 4 of the Control
System Toolbox. Focused on developing interactive control synthesis and system analysis user interfaces and designing new data types to represent linear time-invariant dynamic systems.
Project manager and consultant for version 4 of the System Identification
Toolbox. Worked closely with Prof. Lennart Ljung of Sweden to design and implement a comprehensive graphical user interface for the system identification process.
Principal investigator of the Nonlinear Control Design Toolbox, a computer aided control system design tool used with MATLAB and SIMULINK. The toolbox provides a convenient graphical user interface to aid controls engineers in specifying time domain performance specifications and tunable variables.
Once performance constraints and tunable variables have been specified, the toolbox automatically formulates a constrained optimization problem which it then iteratively solves using gradient search techniques.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA
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Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Teaching Assistant
Fall 1991 and Spring 1992
Taught recitation sessions (20-25 students), conducted tutorial sessions
(5-7 students), graded problem sets and labs, supervised monthly lab sessions, and developed problem sets for undergraduate Probabilistic System Analysis and Circuits and Electronics courses.
General Electric
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Corporate Research and Development Center, Schenectady, NY, USA
Research Associate
June 1990 - January 1991
Conducted master's thesis research. Contributed to the formulation of practical linear multivariable constrained configuration control design methods used by GE Aircraft Engine Division. Helped to develop an internally distributed MATLAB toolbox for robust and constrained control design.
Defense Systems Division, Pittsfield, MA, USA
Engineering Intern
Summers 1988, 1989 and January 1989, 1990
Developed FORTRAN-77 code to model linear and nonlinear servo phenomena.
Ran and verified simulation software. Designed and tested fault insertion/isolation procedures for digital servo. Wrote specification documents. Assignments sponsored under contracts for Bradley Fighting
Vehicle and PHALANX Close-In Weapons System.
Education
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
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Master of Science and Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (SMEE/SBEE)
June 1992
Master's thesis research supervised by Dr. Dean Minto of GE CR&D and Prof.
Munter Dahleh in association with the Laboratory for Information and Decision
Systems at MIT. Undergraduate "minor" in economics and business.
Publications
============
Andrew F. Potvin, PEM Fuel Cell Toolbox, Hydrogenics Corporation, Mississauga,
ON, Canada, (in progress) 2004.
Andrew F. Potvin (with Li Qiu and Tongwen Chen), Multirate Sampled-Data
Toolbox, HKUST, Hong Kong, 1998.
Li Qiu, Tongwen Chen, Andrew Potvin, Jun Gu, Kan Tan, Sun Yong, and Huang Shu,
"Development of MATLAB Tools for Multirate Control and Case Studies," CDC,
Kobe, Japan, December 1996.
Andrew F. Potvin, "Nonlinear Control Design Toolbox," SIMS Conference,
Stockholm, August 1994.
Andrew F. Potvin, Nonlinear Control Design Toolbox: For Use with MATLAB,
The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, MA, 1993.
Andrew F. Potvin, A Unified Solution to Constrained Configuration Control
Law Design, SM Thesis, M.I.T. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems,
Cambridge, MA, 1991.
A.F. Potvin and K.D. Minto, "A general framework for constrained configuration control law design," IFAC Symposium on Control Design, Zurich, 1991.
K.D. Minto (with contributions from Chalek, Chow, Beseler, and Potvin),
ISICLE© Integrated Suite for Interactive Control Law Engineering, User's
Guide: Version 2.0, GE CR&D, Schenectady, NY, 1991.
Keyword index
=============
MATLAB matlab SIMULINK simulink Microsoft Office Word PowerPoint
Excel Outlook Microsoft Windows Unix Linux C C++ FORTRAN fortran
Basic Pascal NASTRAN LINPACK linpack EISPACK eispack LAPACK
lapack analysis of variance ANOVA design of experiments alpha beta numerical analysis quantitative analysis Black-Scholes Monte Carlo options pricing derivatives investment banking risk assessment exponentially weighted moving average EWMA risk management lagrangian partial differential equations ordinary differential equations linear algebra filtering image processing program management project management software management software development risk-free interest rate risk free interest rate volatility simulate mathematics parameterization genetic algorithms GA fuzzy logic neural nets optimal control optimization system identification sysid modeling process control model predictive control covariace correlation statistics hypothesis testing quantitative feeback theory
QFT StateFlow state transition diagrams state machines uncertainty parameter variation noise disturbances normally distributed signals randomly distributed signal processing simulation systems engineering control design control analysis gain scheduled control bang-bang sliding mode control optimal control robust control modern control
Kalman estimation trajectory satellite missile pointing aircraft engines paper automotive automobile vehicle drive system H-2
H-infinity L1 multirate multi-rate sampled data nonlinear GUI
asynchronous missing data mining trends stochastic processes frequency domain time series MatrixX SystemBuild PEM low-order
PID PI tuning Scheduler scheduling just-in-time JIT lead lag time-varying linear quality control dynamic response forecast strategic forecasting economic economy Brownian motion robot robotics flexible structures Markov discrete time uncertain hydrogen fuel cell pumps blowers fluid flow airflow stability controllable observable closed loop open loop feedforward.
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