ROBERT H ZAKON A full vitae is also available

WORK SUMMARY

CTO & Director of Creative Technology Solutions, Zakon Group LLC, 2001-Present
Sample Clients: Cyber Defense Agency, Appalachian Mtn Club, Clean Air Task Force, MITRE
Sample Projects: OpenConf, intranets/extranets, e-commerce, data/info architectures, solar WiFi

Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer (CTO), SoftZoo.com, Inc., 1999-2001

E-commerce consumer software portal and ASP

Principal Engineer & Internet Evangelist, MITRE Corporation, 1992-1999

Multilingual Computing, Intelligence Systems, Internet Technologies, Information Security

Director, Distributed Decision Making Research Lab, Weatherhead School of Management, 1990-1992

Independent Consultant, 1988-1990

KEY STRENGTHS

Strategic Technology Initiatives
Rapid Prototyping & Programming
Emerging Technology & Market Assessments
Team Building & Management
Strategic Corporate Planning
Systems Integration & Administration
             Advanced Technology Research
Training, Development, & Mentoring
Cross-Organization Collaboration
Client Needs Analysis
Multicultural & Accessibility Sensitivity
Simple & Creative Solutions

SELECTED ACCOMPLISHMENTS

  • Set the vision and led the development and operations of a consumer software portal and ASP, while at the same time building up a new organization, raising venture capital, hiring and managing senior and junior team members, overseeing and evaluating service providers, and ensuring coordination and collaboration across all corporate sectors.

  • As a Technical Ambassador, spent one year at MITRE sites around the world educating engineers and managers on emerging technologies and facilitating collaboration with their corporate counterparts.

  • Led the deployment of a multi-national network for the sharing of open sources among the intelligence components of various countries. Brought in to jumpstart this stalled program with responsibility for both the design and implementation of the network and information infrastructures, and lead technical discussions with government officials of participating and interested countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, UK).

  • Integrated the first machine translation system with the Web, pre-dating similar Internet capabilities by more than three years. This capability has been deployed and used worldwide for over ten years.

  • Designed and developed one of the first corporate intranets, MITRE's Information Infrastructure.

  • Designed and deployed the highest wireless network (WiFi - 802.11) in the Eastern US.

EDUCATION

Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Cleveland, OH, 1986-1992
M.S. Computer Engineering & Science
B.S. Computer Engineering major with Psychology and Philosophy concentrations

The Peddie School, Hightstown, NJ

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

  • Senior Member, IEEE
  • Board of Advisors Member, First Run Angel Group
  • Organizing Committee Member & Web Advisor, ACSAC (Security Conference)
  • Chairman, SIGNIDR V (Networked Information Discovery & Retrieval Conference)
  • Co-Chairman, User Interface Symposium
  • Coordinator, Foreign Language Technology Symposium
  • Review Committee Member, IWIPS (Internationalization of Products and Systems)
  • Author of Hobbes’ Internet Timeline, published in hundreds of magazines, books, and web sites
  • Presenter at over 20 conferences, symposia, and invited keynotes, including the WWW (W3C) Conference, Eastern Communications Forum, and NATO Information Systems Management Conference
  • Author of over 30 technical papers and briefings ranging in topic from information security and Internet technologies to multilingual computing and technology policy
  • Book reviewer for O’Reilly & Associates and MacMillan Publishing

AWARDS

Recognition Award, OSIS International – secure multinational VPN
“Your efforts have resulted in a solution that allows International ... access securely using low-cost commercial technologies in an innovative manner”
Recognition Award, BCS – first bilingual (English/Japanese) Intelink extranet
“Your contributions ... are indicative of the type of behavior that adds value and reflects well on MITRE”
Director's Distinguished Accomplishment Award, WebMT – first web integration of machine translation
“Despite an extremely aggressive schedule, and a limited budget, The ... Team rapidly defined, designed, and deployed”     “Working with initially vague requirements, the indefatigable ... Team worked long hours to ensure an excellent product which received customer praise”
Director's Distinguished Accomplishment Award, MITRE Information Infrastructure (intranet)
Program Achievement Award, Intelligence Community Open Source Coverage & Capabilities Database
Special Recognition Award, NASA Spacelink Interface Study
“Your contributions were outstanding and performed under difficult conditions, including short turnaround time and limited funds. Your participation was critical to the success”

SELECTED TECHNOLOGY SKILLS (at least 2 years cumulative experience)

Operating Systems: Linux, Windows, Solaris, HP/UX, A/IX, UNIX, Macintosh

OS Add-ons: Terminal Services, Citrix MetaFrame, Citrix NFuse, SSH, X Window, Motif, AFS

Languages: Perl, PHP, C, C++, JAVA, JavaScript, AJAX, Shell, ColdFusion

Databases/Directories: SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, LDAP, HyperCard

WWW: HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, DHTML, RDF, PICS, SSL, CGI, Unicode, Apache HTTP, ...

Security/Network: firewalls, PKI, biometrics, routers, Netscape (iPlanet) Proxy, digital signatures, encryption, RSA, content switches, VPN, smart cards, DNS, wireless, Wi-Fi / 802.11

Antiquated: WAIS, Gopher, PLWeb, Ultrix, VMS, Sun/OS, Pascal, BASIC, Assembly

Applied Concepts: multilingual computing, machine translation, language identification, computational linguistics, information retrieval, thin-client computing, multicasting, unicasting, credit-card processing, rapid prototyping, human-computer interface, usability, computer-support collaborative work, content management, extreme programming, digital libraries, artificial intelligence, internationalization (i18n), localization (l10n), mobile code and agents, e-commerce, information organization/taxonomy, knowledge engineering, cognitive science, load-balancing, fault-tolerance, visualization, streaming