Last Update: June 15th 2000

Speaker Biographies for the Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum.

(in alphabetical order)

Mitchell Bunnell, Chief Technology Officer, LynuxWorks

Mitchell Bunnell co-founded Digital Lynx, in Dallas, Texas in 1986 with his brother Michael. In 1988, the company moved to California and was re-incorporated as Lynx.

Mitch was the main designer of the LynxOS kernel, which is the core technology of the company, and served as Lynx' Vice President of Engineering. He is now responsible for the development of LynuxWorks's future technology strategy, in addition to developing evolutionary, key enhancements to LynxOS. Prior to founding Digital Lynx, he worked on real-time projects as a programmer and consultant in order to help fund his university education. He developed software for oil pump motor control, petroleum distillation, high-speed data acquisition for wind tunnel testing, and video games. Mitch also serves as a director on LynuxWorks's Board of Directors. He holds a BSEE Summa Cum Laude from the University of Houston.

Fogelin, the company's sixth employee, began as "staff carpenter" for Wind River in 1987 building shelves for computers. From this auspicious start, he went on to the wind(r) microkernel, which resides at the heart of the VxWorks(r) run-time system. Subsequently, he led the development team that built the revolutionary Tornado(tm) project. Today Fogelin oversees all aspects of research and development for the Tornado tools and VxWorks operating system, the technologies at the center of Wind River software.

Before joining Wind River, Fogelin designed hardware for embedded applications used in devices ranging from biomedical equipment to arcade games.

His interest in engineering is not limited to software, however. He has also crafted a sea-worthy kayak, as well as a guitar and is in the process of restoring his 1962 Volvo.

Steve Furr, Senior Developer, QNX Systems

Steve is a senior developer at QNX Systems. He currently works on the QNX Neutrinos RTOS, and is also a core member of the Real Time Expert group formed under Sun's Java Community Process to develop a specification for realtime extensions to the Java API.

Mark Gerhardt, Chief Architect , TimeSys Corporation

Mark is currently involved with refining and using methodologies for real-time objected oriented architecture development. He is frequently called upon to teach and lecture on Object-Oriented systems, Real-Time systems, and their architectural implications.

Mark Gerhardt has been working in the real-time industry for more than thirty years. He been involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of numerous real-time systems especially in the areas of signal and radar processing, special-purpose embedded and real-time computers, and fault tolerant systems as well as having designed and implemented major embedded software applications including C3I and early-warning receivers.

Mark's key technical interests include software and systems engineering methods, system and software architecture, object-oriented architectures, designs, and programming languages (including extensive contributions to the Ada 95 language.) He has been extensively involved in related research and teaching, having co-developed several courses on Object-Oriented systems, Real-Time systems, and Ada.

He has been involved in several standards activities in related fields, including Real-Time CORBA. He is currently involved with standardization of the set of extensions to UML for use in Real-Time systems being developed by the Object Management Group. Mark is the Past Chair of ACM's SIGAda and was a Distinguished Reviewer for Ada9X (now called Ada 95.)

Mark received his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree Magna Cum Laude from the City College of New York in 1967 and his Master of Science in Engineering (Computer Science) from Princeton University in 1968.

E. Douglas Jensen is the Consulting Scientist for the Information Technologies Directorate in the Center for Air Force C2 Systems at the MITRE Corporation's Bedford, MA, headquarters. MITRE is a non-profit, public service, corporation which owns three federally funded research and development centers -- it is an international leader in the systems engineering of large, complex information systems, especially (but not exclusively) military command and control, and air traffic control, systems. His principal interest is conducting research, advanced technology development, and technology transfer in the field of distributed object systems having adaptive, application-level, multi-dimensional, end-to-end quality of service (e.g., timeliness, availability, security) for control applications. He came to MITRE in 1998 from similar positions at Hewlett Packard, Digital Equipment Corp., Concurrent Computer Corp., and KSR. Prior to that, he was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, from 1979 to 1987. From 1965 to 1979, he was employed in the real-time computer industry, where he engaged in research and advanced technology development of distributed real-time computer systems, hardware, and software for the defense and industrial automation domains. He is generally recognized as one of the original pioneers, and leading visionaries, of distributed real-time computer systems, and is widely sought throughout the world as a speaker and consultant.

Richard H. Paine works in a research and technology organization for The Boeing Company in Seattle, Washington, USA. He has worked in the computer data networking field for twenty three years and at The Boeing Company for 13 years.

Mr Paine first worked for the Air Force, writing network protocols in assembler language and then leading FORTRAN and real-time programming organizations. He was commander of a computer center in the United Kingdom and then moved back to the states, working in the design, contract, and implementation of a worldwide weather graphics network.

His work at Boeing consists of work in multi-level secure local area networks, in the logical design of the network for the defense and space side of the company, and then moved into developing strategic architectures for the research and technology side of the aerospace business. He has led such projects within Boeing as the Web, Wireless and Mobility, Communications Security, Voice Over IP, and the Directory Enabled Network.

Lt Col Logan is assigned to the DoD Open Systems Joint Task Force and directs a multi-disciplined government/industry team responsible for accelerating application of open systems concepts to weapon systems.

He has over 20 years experience in systems acquisition including space launch vehicles, nuclear test ban treaty monitoring and modular avionics.

Colonel Logan is a distinguished graduate of the University of Louisiana - Lafayette and earned a Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology.

Mr. Protzman is an engineer with DCS Corporation, and for the past seven years has supported the Tank Automotive Research and Development Engineering Center (TARDEC) in the development and evolution of real time distributed embedded systems architectures for ground vehicle systems. In support of this effort, Mr. Protzman has worked with various Government and industry working groups and standards committees, including the Army Weapon Systems Technical Architecture Working Group (WSTAWG) and the IEEE Portable Application Standards Committee (PASC). He has been a key contributor and author of the WSTAWG Operating Environment (OE) Application Programmer Interface (API), a real time distributed computing environment for embedded systems. Prior to his employment with DCS, Mr. Protzman worked in the Aerospace Software Division of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation supporting the design, development, and integration of real time embedded software for RADARs and FLIRs within avionics systems. Mr. Protzman is also the chairman of NCITS H3, the ANSI accredited standards committee which serves as the ISO JTC 1 SC24 counterpart and which is responsible for the standardization of computer graphics and imaging technologies within the US.

The US Army Operating Environment - a distributed realtime solution

The Weapon System Technical Architecture Working Group (WSTAWG) Operating Environment (OE) Application Programmer's Interface (API) provides a standardized interface to a set of distributable objects, which can be utilized to provide a foundation and infrastructure supporting the creation of rehostable distributed real time embedded weapon systems applications. The OE API has been defined in accordance with the Army Weapon System Technical Architecture Working Group (WSTAWG), such that it provides a common set of services required to support the development and integration of systems throughout the weapon systems subdomains (Aviation, Ground Vehicle, Missile, Munitions, and Soldier). In addition, the OE API has been defined in a scaleable, extensible, language independent manner such that it can be tailored to application specific requirements (e.g. level of functionality, programming language, etc.), resulting in an increased potential for application reuse throughout the Army weapon system domain.

The OE API defines the detailed concepts, functionality, and interfaces required to support the development of both OE implementations and applications. In addition, the OE API addresses the underlying architectural support issues of embedded real time systems in order to define the behavior and operation of the OE within the weapon systems application environment.

Kevin Quick has been a lead engineer in design and development at Interphase Corporation in Dallas, Texas for over 6 years, developing host adapter software for various network and protocol-based products, with a particular focus on Fibre Channel in the last several years. Prior to Interphase he was part of a 5-person startup designing serial WAN products and before that was a developer at Simpact Associates in San Diego, California, working on X.25 serial protocol support.

Kevin is also the Chairman of Project UDI, which is a public multi-vendor specifications group developing uniform interfaces for device drivers to support host adapters in multiple and diverse environments (see http://www.project-udi.org/.

Kevin holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA.

Within the Center for Information Technology Standards, Mr. Richards is responsible for identification of DoD information technology requirements, assessment of the sufficiency of commercial standards to meet those requirements, determination and initiation of actions to correct deficiencies and to develop test and certification projects. In addition to his responsibilities as division chief, Mr. Richards represents the DoD in a broad number of information and communications standards bodies. He is currently the Chair of the NCITS Technical Committee R-1, Real-time Computing

Mr. Royster is responsible for overseeing the implementation of the Department of Defense's architecture tools, development and implementation, Open Systems policy including the use of widely supported, commercial, interface standards in the design and acquisition of command/control systems and weapons systems.

Mr. Royster is the technical lead for the next generation Real-time Defense Information Infrastructure Common Operating Environment for DoD architecture implementation, and is also a Vice-Chair of IEEE PASC .

Curtis received his Bachelor of Science in Computer System Science from the University of District of Columbia in 1982, and his Master of Science in Systems Engineering from George Mason University in 1998.

Victor Yodaiken is founder of FSMLabs and the creator of RTLinux. Yodaiken has worked on operating systems since the early 1980s when he was one of the primary designers of of distributed fault tolerant UNIX system for a company called Auragen. More recently Yodaiken was a professor and chair of computer science at the New Mexico Institute of Technology in Socoro New Mexico. Currently Yodaiken manages FSMLabs, a company founded in 1998 to provide commercial support and consulting for RTLinux.

Making POSIX 1003.13 fit for the real world

RTLinux: Realtime Linux began with a handmade simple API and rapidly acquired a large user base and many applications in fields as diverse as multimedia and telecom. For the last year, FSMlabs have tried to migrate users and applications towards the POSIX 10003.13 PE51 standard. In this talk we will discuss implementation issues, problems and advantages of this standard when it meets real applications and a need to push performance to hardware limits.

Myron Zimmerman is responsible for VenturCom's technology and product planning. For eleven years prior to reorganizing the company and redefining his role in 1995, Zimmerman served as VenturCom's president. During this period, he led the company from being a consulting-based business that managed major UNIX software development contracts to a growing product-oriented company. Immediately after co-founding VenturCom in 1980 with colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Zimmerman served as the company's director of engineering.

Earlier in his career, Zimmerman co-founded PDS -- a provider of pre-term labor-monitor products and other medical diagnostic products -- as well as Bos/TEN (Boston Technical Executive Network), a support group of high technology CEO's in the Greater Boston area. In addition, he is the director of a family-owned concrete equipment manufacturing business. Zimmerman holds Bachelor of Science degrees, Cum Laude, in Physics and Mathematics (highest honors in Physics) from Juniata College (Huntingdon, PA), and a Ph.D. in Atomic Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA).

Real-time for Windows NT

This talk with cover Real-time for Windows NT/2000, giving an overview of the current state of Windows NT. This will include an overview of Windows NT Embedded, the Real-time API for Windows drivers and applications, and the RTX real-time extension for Windows NT The talk will include a performance comparision - WinCE, WinNT and RTX and look at the Real-time software component model for Windows.