2007 to 2008

Project Engineer

At the Woburn branch of Concepts NREC, I managed the construction of a $700,000 test facility for an experimental air compressor. We met design criteria, finished on time, and on budget.

Spring 2007

Volunteer Engineer

In the Spring of 2007, I worked as a volunteer with Para Los Niños, an NGO that provides assistance to government run homes for ward of the state children and adults in Bolivia. My efforts were largely focused on upgrading a 2.8km fence that is used to safeguard a group of 24 mentally and physically disabled adults at the Kallutaca group home.

Additional information available on the Bolivia page.

2005 to 2006

Knowledge Management Engineer

At Concepts NREC I was employeed as a software applications specialist. Ever a nebulous title, I was employed to develop various search tools and address knowledge management issues at Concepts NREC.

Concepts NREC kindly allowed me to release the following code:

Google Mini Proxy
A python based CGI script to provide a secure proxy to a Google Mini server. This allows for secure access control to sub-collections.

Google Mini Crawler
A smarter directory crawler to feed the Google Mini indexer.

Zope Monitor
The dark force that powers Plone. Actually, this is a spinning zope and errant helper processes monitoring daemon.

MS Word to HTML
Microsoft Word to HTML converter. Garbage in, beauty out.

Chunk Emailer (*nix only)
A backup script to tar files, break them into chunks (for size limits), and then emails them as attachments. Cleans up after itself. (This was non-Concepts NREC code.)

2001 to 2004

Postgraduate Researcher

Previously I was a post-graduate researcher at the Engineering Design Centre at Cambridge University, where I spent three years earning a PhD. My research there was focused on understanding how engineers prefer to store and retrieve design information with the goal of improving information accessibility.

In a nutshell, I created a model of how engineers intuitively understand and structure engineering design knowledge in their minds. I then combined this model with a search engine and used it to retrieve engineering design information. This research was carried out in combination with BAE SYSTEMS, and Rolls-Royce Plc.

In the spirit of academic sharing, here are a few papers that I have written:

• Japikse, R.D. (2004). Structuring and Retrieving Engineering Design Knowledge PhD. Department of Engineering, Cambridge University, Cambridge. (PhD Thesis)
• Japikse, R.D., Langdon, P., Wallace, K.M. (2003) "Structuring Engineering Design Information Using a Model of How Engineers' Intuitively Structure Design Information." International Conference on Engineering Design ICED, Stockholm, Sweden, Design Society. (Conference Paper)
• Langdon, P., Japikse, R.D., Clarkson, P., Wallace, K.M. (2003) "The Effectiveness of Psychological Distance in an Emprical Study of Guideline Clustering for Aerospace Design."International Conference on Engineering Design ICED, Stockholm, Sweden, Design Society. (Conference Paper)
• Japikse, R.D., Japikse, D., Pelton, R. (2004) "Evaluation of Neural Networks for Meanline Model Development." 10th International Symposium on Transport Phenomena and Dynamics of Rotating Machinery (ISROMAC-10), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. (Conference Paper)