05 Apr 2006
I had the pleasure today of listening to Don Listwin, CEO of the Canary Foundation (former CEO of Openwave Systems and senior executive at Cisco), announce a $1 million grant to the BC Cancer Foundation to help aid in the early detection of cancer (with ovarian cancer being the initial platform).
Along with the gift came the announcement that Dr. Brad Nelson, director of the Deely Research Centre, has joined the foundation’s renowned team of scientists.
As someone who has seen first hand the impact of cancer, it’s nice to see someone with the finances and personal drive necessary to effect change. As Don has said many times, cancer is not so much a research problem as it is an engineering problem. One of the problems faced stems from a significant imbalance of funds directed towards early detection and prevention versus later stage treatment. The truth of the mater is that it’s expensive to work in early detection and with an uncertain outcome, industry tends to shy away because of the expense and academic researchers aren’t inclined to investigate things that may have an unpublishable result. It takes organizations like the Canary Foundation to help bridge this gap and bring researchers and industry together. Industry will come on board after they’ve seen a proof of concept, and researchers will be more inclined to investigate when they have sufficient funding so that they aren’t dependant on the next publication-related grant.
I applaud the work that Don and his team of contributors has done to date. Don’s actually an investor and sits on the board of GenoLogics so I’ve been fortunate enough to listen to him speak on a couple of occassions. He’s a very motivating speaker and I’d encourage you to listen to him if you ever have the opportunity. To top it off, he’s a Canadian as well (even though the Canary Foundation is an american non-profit corporation). Hell, he bought the San Jose Grand Prix and uses it as a fund raiser. Doesn’t get much cooler than that.
The Canary Foundation was founded in 2004 by Don Listwin, and is supported by scientists, doctors and philanthropists. It’s committed to assisting the next generation of cancer fighters on the frontlines of early detection research. Canary Foundation is collaborating with some of the leading cancer research centers in the world, including the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) in Seattle; Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, California; and The University of California San Francisco Comprehensive Cancer Center.
02 Apr 2006
It’s been a month or so since it wrapped out so I figured it’s about time to write a blog about it.
It all started a few weeks before Christmas with an email from an Amazon.com recruiter inquiring as to my availability to come to an interviewing session in Vancouver, BC (I live in Victoria so it would have been a short ferry ride). Being in the midst of a significant re-architecting push, I wasn’t able to make the trip but decided to have a phone conversation instead.
The initial phone screen interview went fairly well I thought. I learned a few apealing things about the organization, most notably their dedication to technology and emphasis on small cross-functional teams (the so called 2 pizza teams). Coming from a startup environment (I’m currently employed by a start-up and have seen it grow from 2 people to 45+ people) while remaining relatively flat.
The next stage in the process was a phone interview with the lead of the Item DB team. Wasn’t quite sure what to expect but a few google searches led me to brush up a bit on general data structures, etc. Sure enough, this interview (and a subsequent technical phone interview) spent a lot of time on general data structures (list vs. array, etc.). There were also a couple of design questions and a coding question or two at the end. The coding question actually threw me for a loop, not so much in the actual writing of the code but more in the trying to communicate what I had scribbled on a piece of paper over the phone. Needless to say, I thought it went alright but at that point my hopes weren’t that high.
A day or two later, I heard back from the recruiter who wanted to setup another interview with a member of the contribution profit team. Sure, I said, no harm in that. So I talked again for a couple hours with a developer about what I’d been doing, what he’s been doing, and the general direction of this team. He told me that he didn’t think I was interviewing for his team (but I learned later on that I actually was). The general theme of the interview covered a lot of data structures, a relatively straight forward design question and a coding question. Compared to the previous interview, I thought that this one went much better. I had an idea of what to expect, and given that I wasn’t actively looking for another opportunity, nothing to loose.
Again, a couple days later I heard back from the recruiter asking my availability to fly down to seattle for a half day of on-site interviews. After thinking it over, I decided to do it.
Amazon set it all up, I flew down the day before, stayed at the W Seattle (a pretty swank hotel in the downtown district) before flying out the following day. Amazon itself has 4 or 5 campuses in Seattle and I interviewed at their Bank of America building campus. If you don’t know Seattle, the Bank of America is the tallest building in the city (from what I could tell at least) and if you like baseball or football, it also provides a good view of Safeco and Seahawks stadium.
The on-site interviewing process was interesting and fairly intense. It was split into a number of sessions, with each session lasting no longer than 45 minutes. I started out meeting a couple of developers, then met a couple of hiring managers, team leads and senior developers, before ending the day with the third recruiter I’d had contact with.
Each interview was fairly similar and very technical in nature. I stayed in the same room the entire time and as they put it, my goal was to fill up the walls with code and design (the room had a table made out of 2×4’s and the walls were all writable). The day started out with some fairly simple algorithmic questions (pick a random line out of a file, count of # of pairs that add to a number in an array, etc) before getting into some design. The design questions were based on real world systems (movie rentals, restaurant reservation systems, etc.) but were relatable to problems that Amazonians face on a daily basis.
I thought the day went fairly well and I headed back to Victoria comtemplating my future. Amazon, keeping to their word, got back to me the following monday (interviewed on Friday) and offered me a position within their contribution profit/demand forecasting team.
The overall compensation offered was quite good and the challenge of the position also intriguing. Going into the process, I really wanted to work with smart people and solve technically interesting problems. I was confident that Amazon would be able to offer that, more so than my current employer (more because of the processes Amazon already has in place and the enterprise nature of the development they do).
After going back and forth with people from Amazon and my current senior management, I decided that it wasn’t in my best interest to make the move. It’s nice to be feel wanted, but the opportunity to work for a successful startup in a small city like Victoria doesn’t come along very often. I’m going to stick with it, continue to grow with the company and come some point in the future, sign up for the large company experience.
If anyone has any questions about interviewing with Amazon, feel free to get in touch. Everyone at the company came across as extremely competent and driven, they’ve obviously been successful in the past and I think it’s a great opportunity. It’s a professional organization that hasn’t forgotten its roots and is interesting enough fairly frugal. There’s an emphasis on the individual and small team successes which was a good fit with me.
That’s enough of a synopsis for one night.
27 Mar 2006
I just got my email about registering for the Riya beta.
Don’t know what Riya is?
Basically some next generation face recognition software that will eventually provide a more efficient and effective way of searching and indexing photographs (that’s my take on it, it may or may not jive with Riya’s true mission)
My first impression is that it’s sort of flickr’ish. There is a desktop uploader (written in Java) that allows you to select and upload your images. Once uploaded, you manually train the recognition on your image set using a fairly intuitive (and simple for the time being) web interface.
The manual training asks you for a full name and email address for each recognized face, I haven’t looked farther but I wonder if it supports training across users (ie. I say someone looks like Adam Jordens (my.email@address.com) and someone else says the same thing, is the software smart enough to know its the same person).
Eventually I’m guessing it would be, but for the time being, Riya is as smart as a 2-year old. It’s up to us to upload content and help the training progress. I encourage you all to get in on the beta and give it a shot. I’ll write a follow-up post in a few days once I’ve had time to upload more images and better test the system.