Niniane Wang

Education

M.S., Computer Science, University of Washington, 2001. GPA 3.9. (While working fulltime at Microsoft.)
B.S., Computer Science, California Institute of Technology, 1998. GPA 3.8. (Graduated at age 18.)

For 1/2009 to present, see Personal Projects section.

9/2003 - 11/2008, Engineering Manager, Google Inc.

Lively by Google

Created vision, founded the project.
Recruited and managed a team from product inception through launch as lively.com.
Co-inventor on 5 pending patents.

Gmail Ads

Led a team of engineers to improve Gmail revenue via enhancements in text processing, information categorization, and user interface. Increased revenue by 140% via fourteen improvements.
Personally implemented features in C++ and Java.
Co-inventor on 3 pending patents.

Google Desktop Search

Served on founding team of Desktop Search from product inception through public launch. Desktop is now used by 38 million active users.
Helped Google set up processes for client-side development, such as Windows engineering hiring pipeline, configuration testing, performance analysis.
Personally implemented key components including the search query system, instant messenger capture, snippets, the sidebar.
Co-inventor on 19 pending patents.
Won a Google Founder's Award.

Throughout Google experience

Served on the Hiring Committee which makes offer decisions on candidates.
Along with a lead recruiter, build the Windows recruiting process, including job description, interview questions, training the interviewers, determining job criteria, and finding sources for quailty candidates.
Screened 10 - 20 engineering resumes per week.
Launched Movie Showtimes on google.com as a 20% project.
Featured in Google recruiting materials that appeared in full-page ads or articles in New York Times, CNN, FastCompany, monster.com, Fortune magazine.

7/1998 - 9/2003, Microsoft

Software Design Engineer Lead, Microsoft Flight Simulator

Managed a sub-team of developers through shipping Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight.
Created the dynamic weather system, the main selling point of Flight Simulator 2004. This feature was proclaimed a breakthrough by reviewers.
Developed a service that streams real-time weather conditions into the simulation, updated every 15 minutes.
Analyzed and improved performance. Doubled framerates and reduced stutters to virtually nil.
Developed a technology for real-time cloud rendering, which I presented at SIGGRAPH and GDC, and published in Journal of Graphics Tools.
Improved multiplayer experience and matchmaking system. Wrote flight instructor module.

Software Engineer, Microsoft Sports and Racing Games

Implemented various areas of a racing game for PC and Xbox, including UI, art pipeline, input system.

Wrote a TF-IDF (information retrieval) library in python. Referenced by wikipedia as example implementation for TF-IDF.
Wrote a web site for people to track goals, such as sleep, exercise, weight loss. The UCSF psychology research department is a paying customer. The site is implemented in python using Django, running on EC2.
Wrote a Drupal PHP web site that accumulates hotel reviews.

Wang, N., Wade, B. Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow (and Rain). Game Programming Gems 5, Charles River Media. 2005.
Wang, N. Realistic and Fast Cloud Rendering, Journal of Graphics Tools. 2004.
Wang, N. Let There Be Clouds, Game Developers Magazine. January 2004.
Ishii, H., Page, S., Wang, N. 1999. A Day at the Beach: Human Agents Self-Organizing on the Sand Pile. Advances in Complex Systems. Vol 2, Issue 1. p 37 - 64.

Native Mandarin speaker.