BIOGRAPHY
Behnam (Ben) Ashjari is an Information Technology (IT) Professional with over 20 years of experience in computer and information technology, placing emphasis on mission critical solutions in data warehousing and data mining. He is experienced in the full lifecycle of building and productionalizing several large-scale data warehouse systems. The emerging field of data mining has been created by the marriage of his two specialties, data warehousing and pattern recognition.
He obtained a B.S. with
Honors from
Purdue University in 3 years, and M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Southern
California all in Electrical Engineering. He is published in the
fields of data & information engineering, and pattern recognition.
Dr. Ashjari has performed research and development for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) in image pattern recognition. He has also performed industrial R&D in document imaging, check courtesy and legal amounts recognition, and signature recognition. He has conceptualized and designed Image Warehousing. He was a pioneer in integration of mobile Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) with text/image databases for law enforcement applications; and his achievements in this area received laudatory reviews in the Mobile Office Magazine (July 1995) under the feature title: “War Story: High-Tech Cops”.
Since 1990, he has been involved in the hands-on application of large-scale knowledge & data engineering for the financial industry and law enforcement. During this time, he has held senior consulting or full-time positions in data architecture, data warehousing, and data mining with Fortune 100 companies and the Government including MetLife, PepsiCo, Citibank, Chase Manhattan Bank, CoreStates Financial, Bell Labs., United Nations, IBM, New York Telephone, and law enforcement.
Dr. Ashjari is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of DAMA. Since 1992, he has been on the faculty of the State University of New York (SUNY) as an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering where he has taught his popular courses in data and image engineering and digital signal processing. He is currently the CTO of HTC. In his past responsibilities, he was Director of IT Application Development at MetLife, where he worked on data engineering & management with applications to enterprise e-commerce, and the Group Manager of Data Warehousing at PepsiCo and Pepsi Bottling Group. His Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) Certification is pending, with specialty in Oracle 9i Application Development.
RESUME
Behnam (Ben) Ashjari, Ph.D.
Senior Data Warehouse Architect & Manager
(914) 282-6930
(914) 276-0416 Fax
QUALIFICATIONS
More than 24 years of experience in diverse technology environments, most of which on mission critical solutions in full lifecycle of data mining and data warehousing. In a team effort, architected, modeled, mapped, built and productionalized several multi-million dollar large-scale data warehouse systems. The emerging field of Data Mining has been created by the marriage of his two areas of specialty, data warehousing and pattern recognition.
Valuable experience at different organizations, in both vertical and horizontal markets, has provided for honing ability to work with a variety of people, from customers and users to CIOs and managers, in a variety of large scale data intensive requirements.
Citizenship: USA
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering-Systems, Signal & Image Processing Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California; 2/1982. Thesis supported in part by a grant from DARPA and monitored by the U.S. Air Force.
M.S. in Electrical Engineering-Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA; 6/1978. Grant Supported by DARPA.
B.S. with Honors in Electrical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana; 5/1974.
WORK EXPERIENCE
Data Engineering & Management (1990-Present)
HI-TECH Consulting, Inc.
Chief Technical Officer
Full-time permanent employee, New York Metropolitan area. Architecture and building of data warehouses. Full lifecycle of data warehousing & data mining (CRM, market basket, predictive and correlative), data architecture, SQL development, technical business analysis and business intelligence. Data integration, architecture, modeling, analysis and design of data warehouses, and projects such as data tool selection, application, ETL, data quality and cleansing and active batch scheduling, and data mining & business intelligence, Cognos PowerPlay Client and Enterprise Server, and Impromptu. ORACLE9iR2 and SQL Server Data Warehousing. Pioneered integration of CDPD with databases for law enforcement applications; his achievements in this area received laudatory reviews in the Mobile Office Magazine (July 1995) under the main feature title “War Story: High-Tech Cops".
Performed work for Citibank, Chase Manhattan Bank, Bell Labs., United Nations, IBM, and Government law enforcement. In all of these projects, Dr. Ben Ashjari has been the principal and the solution architect in charge. See HI-TECH Services page please.
MetLife
Director of Application Development
New York, NY; Unification of data from various sources for a 25 million Customer data warehouse. Responsibilities included leading the design of a Web based Reporting and Scorecard System. Performed a study of tools needed for which culminated in a broad encompassing tool report with a byproduct of Ab-Initio as the ETL and data migration tool of choice for MetLife's data extraction, transformation and load needs. Performed logical and physical modeling using ERwin for the back-end, and OLAP solutions using Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay on the front-end. Worked with Trillium, UML & Use Case for business data modeling and applied Business Rules approach to application development using Rational Rose. Planned and followed the progress with MS Project.
PepsiCo
Group Manager of Data Warehousing
Westchester, NY; Responsible for the data warehouse fed by data sources from 10 national business units across the United States. Applied SQL development and SQL Server 7.0 operations. Performed data modeling and mapping, and built reporting metrics. In the management arena, built a team of professionals composed of 12 full-time employees and 4 consultants and managed them. This group was divided into 4 teams: Data Architecture, Data Administration & DBA, Data Staging, and Query Consolidation & Optimization. The latter was for creation of a data mart with enterprise data aggregates. Took proactive measures for data warehouse problems and project management. Made short-term decisions without sacrificing long-term goals. Ensured that performers were identified, rewarded and grown. Worked on ETL and data migration from InfoPump to Ardent (Ascential) DataStage. Used Sybase OLTP servers to feed data warehouse. Negotiated with and managed vendors.
State University of New York (SUNY)
Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering
New Paltz, New York. Taught courses in Data and Image Engineering, and Digital Signal and Image Processing.
Summary of Prior Years' Work Experience:
Manager of Image Recognition Technology.
Bell Communications Research
Member of Technical Staff, Digital Signal Processing.
Stevens Institute of Technology
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science.
Professional Awards, Activities, and Affiliations:
· DAMA (Data Administration & Management Association).
· Senior Member: Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Computer Society Knowledge & Data Engineering.
· Founding Chairman: Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society Chapter, North Jersey IEEE Section.
· Executive Committee, former member, North Jersey IEEE Section.
· Leadership Award, IEEE Region One, twice awarded.
· Best Presentation Award, Bell Communications Research.
· Received a laudatory review in the Mobile Office Magazine (July 1995) under the main feature title: “War Story: High-Tech Cops”.
· Sigma Xi, Member (The Scientific Research Society).
· Tau Beta Pi, Member (National Engineering Honors Association).
· Eta Kappa Nu, Member (Electrical Engineering Honors Society).
· Visiting Researcher: Institut National de Recherché en Informatique et d'Automatique (I.N.R.I.A.), Paris, France.
· Honors Program in Electrical Engineering, Purdue University, W. Lafayette, Indiana.
· International Scholarship, Purdue.
· NASA, Research Assistant at The Laboratory for Applications of Remote Sensing, Purdue.
· President's Academic Award, Purdue.
· Volunteer in Professional Technical Organizations.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Recent Publications and Presentations on Data Engineering:
A complete Analytical Report and Workbook of IT Data Tools for the Insurance Industry, 2001.
Paper entitled “Data Interpolation & Extrapolation for Trend Analysis and Prediction,” presented and published at NABCA Information Technology National Conference, now Association for Management Information in Financial Services (AMI/FS), June 18-20, 1997.
Over a dozen of papers in image recognition in DARPA USC Semi-Annual Technical Reports and International conference proceedings and Workshops.
Post-graduate Training in Data Engineering:
Ralph Kimball Data Warehousing In Depth, San Jose, CA, August 1999.
Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) Certification (pending) with specialty in Oracle9i Application Development.
Health & Fitness, and Hobbies:
Brown Belt, training for Black Belt, Shotokan Karate, Takahashi Dojo, Mt. Kisco, Westchester County, New York. Also, Mt. Kisco Dojo’s Webmaster.
Mathematics and Puzzles.