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With a PhD on my business card, you must be wondering what I know about field data collection for geo-engineering. Thankfully, more than the titles imply. I worked for a civil engineering consulting firm for several years after completing my BS and MS degrees. While there, much of my time was spent in the field collecting data and then generating project reports with it.
One example, which eventually led to some of our more recent software products, was construction quality control. As an engineering technician, I was involved in a lot of QA/QC projects where concrete testing and field density testing of soils were required. At the time, I thought that the data collection and reporting process seemed quite tedious and labor intensive, so a seed was planted. There had to be an easier way to collect all this field data.
These field experiences helped in developing our geotechnical software
I got to explore an easier way as a graduate student. While in graduate school, a beta version of PLog was developed by one of the graduate students working with David (Prateek Goel). During this beta development, we even raced engineers to see if we could log faster on the PDA than they could on paper. PLog won!
From that time on I have worked to improve PLog and develop other software to help geotechnical engineers, geologists and engineering technicians with their work.
Far from being an academic purist, my daily work puts me in contact with the users of our software. They have real problems, questions, and concerns. I listen to them and use their input to continually improve our software. | 