Liam Comerford – Curriculum Vitae

Address:	Details by request
	Carmel, New York USA
Email:	ldcomerford@acm.org
Web:	liamcomerford.com

Professional Experience

11/2007 - Present	Retired
10/1979 – 11/2007	Research Staff Member at IBM TJ Watson Research Center, NY Recognized as a Research Division Master Inventor Six years as Manger of Security Architecture Research group including staff of 4 electrical engineers and 2 programmers Six years as Project Leader on the Personal Speech Assistant including staff of one IBM programmer, 2 contract programmers, and support staff in IBM Industrial Design Center and in Electronic Design in Vimercate Italy. Consistently ranked in top half (often in top third) of Research Staff consisting entirely of PhD’s. Performed numerous technical briefings including National Security Agency and IBM Science Advisory Committee
9/1973	Hired by IBM Research Division as a Laboratory Technician

Patents and Publications

Forty-three patents issued including features of soft keyboards in common use, accelerometer based hard disk protection universally used in laptop computers and fundamental patents in computer software security. Forty-eight patent disclosures published in the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin. Thirteen journal articles.

Please see “Patents and Publications” at http://liamcomerford.com/patents.html

Honors / Events Timeline

October 2007	Retired
September 2007	Fifteenth Plateau Invention Achievement Award
February 2006	Research Division Award – Hard Disk Protective Reflex
January 2006	Research Division Award – Natural Speech Input for Consumer Devices
October 2003	Fourteenth Plateau Invention Achievement Award
January 2000	Thirteenth Plateau Invention Achievement Award
March 1998	Twelfth Plateau Invention Achievement Award
August 1995	Selected as a Research Division Master Inventor
April 1995	Research Division Award – Contributions to LVI Speech Recognition
May 1992	Eleventh Plateau Invention Achievement Award
May 1991	Tenth Plateau Invention Achievement Award
May 1991	Ninth Plateau Invention Achievement Award
December 1990	Eighth Level Invention Achievement Award
August 1988	Seventh Plateau Invention Achievement Award
December 1987	Sixth Invention Achievement Award
April 1987	National Security Agency briefing on ABYSS
September 1986	Research Division Award – Seeing Eye Mouse
July 1986	Outstanding Innovation Award – ABYSS Security System
November 1985	IBM Science Advisory Committee briefing on ABYSS
October 1985	New Manager School
December 1984	Fifth Invention Achievement Award
August 1983	Fourth Invention Achievement Award
April 1981	Third Invention Achievement Award
November 1979	Promotion to Research Staff Member
October 1979	Second Invention Achievement Award
November 1978	Outstanding Contribution Award -- Optical Fiber Data Link
March 1978	Promotion to Senior Associate Engineer
September 1977	First Invention Achievement Award
May 1975	Research Division Award – Grating Coupled Gallium Arsenide Laser
September 1973	Hired at title of Laboratory Technician Promoted five times in the following four years to level of Associate Engineer

Selected Projects

2005	Telematic conversational service architecture – Demonstrated a scaleable, low resource spoken language dialog manager for use in automobiles.
2001	Personal Speech Assistant (with David Frank and Paul Fernhaut) – responsible for electronic, industrial, system and user interface design of a conversational PDA coprocessing system. This was operational and distributed across IBM sales force and to some senior managers in 1995, anticipating the SIRI interface (Apple) by more than a decade.
1999	Visual Basic tools for Speech Driven Applications – Assigned a failed project to deliver a working set of Visual Basic widgets for speech applications, I led the contracted development team to a successful completion of their contract. This entailed both UI and programming work guiding a team of four programmers.
1997	Visually enhanced soft keyboard – demonstrated a methodology for reducing the cognitive burden associated with touch screen software keyboards by visually modifying the keyboard presentation to move probable next-key choices into foreground of perception.
1994	Storywriter – (with Catalina Danis et al) wrote and invented interaction methods for an Editor for persons (Reporters at the New York Times) with carpal tunnel syndrome that utilized dictation and gestural-pointing methods for text entry and editing.
1990 - 1994	Zero pre-travel very short post-travel electronic stylus switch. Delivered prototype styli with mechanical pen-down detection that eliminate recognition errors arising from bad stroke counts created by pen switch chatter. Pens felt like writing instruments because they didn’t have to be pressed to keep pen-down switch activated, thus distorting handwriting.
1993	Desk Size Interaction – Delivered working proof of concept of graphical desktop projected on physical desktop including stylus and printed paper input and projected and printed output, meeting the objective of making books or printed pages part of the computer UI.
1994	LCD inking buffer (with Larry Levy) -- Designed and built a circuit for displaying electronic ink with essentially zero time lag stylus motion to avoid distorting habitual (recognizable) handwriting.
1994	Automated digitizer test stand – designed, built, programmed robotic test stand for quality control of digitizers used in Bluestone Tablet. Data was also captured for correction of individual digitizer astigmatisms.
1994	Bluestone Tablet – industrial, electronic and firmware design and implementation of a desktop tablet for handwriting data capture as a tool for the handwriting recognition group. Approximately 60 tablets delivered at in time to replace aging/failing commercial tablets.
1992	Predictive Keypad – Demonstrated a low resource stylus input method with the capacity to modify its predictions based on user input history and that used the hand-eye coordination and movements typical of cursive writing. A version that eliminated the stylus features was used in the Simon PDA/cellphone fielded by IBM and Southern Bell. This device is widely considered the first smartphone.
1992	Handwriting template – Demonstrated a low resource, correctable handwriting entry method with the capacity to learn new glyphs. This used <16K of memory and was built to be used as Tablet firmware.
1990	Invented the method of detecting the acceleration signature of impending impacts and using that as trigger for placing rotating media in a safe state for impact. This invention is used in every laptop computer with rotating media.
1990	“Flying” Keyboard – delivered proof of concept model keyboard that integrated pointing functions by detecting lateral forces on key tops so the user’s fingers need not leave the home keys to access any mouse function
1984 - 1990	ABYSS – A Basic Yorktown Security System (with Alec Chandra and S. R. White) – Delivered proof of concept models of software delivery system that could be sold in shrink-wrap box, and allow user to create backup copies without allowing piracy of software. Effectively separated the possession of a software from the “right-to-execetue.” This allowed technically enforced terms and conditions of use such as leasing or limited number of uses. The system included advances in secure packaging (effectively cryptographically secure packaging) and installation transactions that could be observed but could not be replicated.
1985	Seeing Eye Mouse – Invented and demonstrated Braille output device for blind computer users costing less than one percent the cost of existing solutions.
1984	Wrote the AWS windowing system for the IBM Desktop 370 – demonstrated stroke gestures as a method of window position, size and view control before APA displays became available on PC’s.
1984	Designed and built Read-by disk cache cards for IBM Desktop 370 to address hard disk bottleneck in processor performance.
1979 - 1983	Fiber optic connector technology – Invented two forms of fiber optic connectors, one allowing rapid field assembly of low loss connections with low tolerance parts, the other allowing pluggable board edge arrays of fiber optic connectors using low tolerance parts.
1982	Developed accelerated life testing apparatus based on S-100 computer and digital bias controllers and derived method for projecting diode life from rate of change of bias requirement.
1980 - 1982	Electro-optic device packaging SO package (with John Harper and Michael J. Brady) . Developed apparatus and methodology for bonding semiconductor lasers to etched silicon optical benches with micron accuracy and thermal resistance on the order of 10℃ per Watt. Developed apparatus and methodology for bonding monolithic arrays of up to 14 semiconductor lasers to silicon optical benches.
1978 - 1979	Electromechanical Fiber Optic Switches for Ring Topology Optical Data Networks – Demonstrated >100,000 cycle life with < 0.3 db insertion loss.
1977 - 1981	ECL based Transmitter, Receiver and Digital Laser Bias control for 500 MBit/Sec Optical Data Link for 801 Minicomputer (first RISC computer) – Demonstrated < 10e-19 Bit Error Rate at 500 MBit/second over 1 km
1975	Developed methodology rapid fabrication of semiconductor lasers from epitaxially grown wafers for QC.
1974 - 1978	Grating coupled double hetero-junction GaAs-AlGaAs laser diodes – Demonstrated holographic crystallographicly aligned grating mask fabrication and preferential etching to create feedback and output diffraction gratings in double-heterojunction laser diode waveguide layers.

Education

New York Polytechnic

Sept. 1975 – Dec. 1979

104 Credits toward BSEE 3.95/4.00 Cum,

Dean’s List, Eta Kappa Nu

RCA Institute 

Sept. 1971 - Aug. 1973

AOS Degree – Top Honors in Math

City College of New York

June 1969 – June 1971

109 Credits toward BS in Math 3.89/4.00

Erasmus Hall HS 

June 1964 

Regents Diploma

Professional Organizations

Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers – Life member

Association for Computing Machinery

Interests and Activities

Building electronic, mechanical and software devices. Building proof-of-concept models of personal inventions.

Theory of Consciousness, Decision Theory, Cultural Anthropology

Certified T’ai Chi Ch’uan Instructor (direct student of Cheng Man-Ching, Certified by Benjamin Pang-Jeng Lo) with more than 50 years of practice and 25 years of teaching experience.

The Historic European Martial Arts (HEMA) revival, Chinese Seal Carving, Ham Radio, Bicycling and Motorcycling