Curriculum Vitae for Russell Almond

Education

1990 Ph.D. in Statistics, Harvard University.
1986 A.M. in Statistics, Harvard University.
1983 B.S. with honors in Mathematics, California Institute of Technology.

Work Experience

Statistical and Computer Science Research

1999-Present: Senior Research Scientist, Educational Testing Service, Psychometric Development and Resources Group, Princeton, NJ 08541.
1996-1999: Research Scientist, Educational Testing Service, Research Statistics Group.
1995-1996: Research Associate, RRA, Inc. Developed statistical algorithms for Los Alamos National Labs.
1992-1995: Research Scientist, StatSci division of MathSoft, Inc. (now Insightful) 1700 Westlake Ave, N, Suit 500, Seattle, WA, 98109.
1990-1991: Acting (Visiting) Assistant Professor, University of Washington, Department of Statistics.
1987-1989: Research Assistant to Professor Arthur P. Dempster, Harvard U. Dept. of Statistics.
1984-1987: Research Assistant to Professor Peter J. Huber, Harvard U. Dept. of Statistics.
1985-1986: Statistical Consultant for U. S. Windpower, Burlington, MA.

1979-1982

Student Summer Intern at Honeywell, Process Control Division, Ft. Washington, PA. A series of four summer jobs which were the result of a High School science award. Each summer was spent with a different engineering group:

Teaching

2005--2007: Volunteer Mentor with MentorPower, Inc. Mentored a local high school student working on a science or engineering project.
2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008: NCME Tutorial: Bayesian Networks in Educational Assessment. Full day tutorial presented jointly with R. Mislevy, D. M. Williamson, and D. Yan.
Fall, 1996: Visiting Lecturer, Department of Statistics, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania.
1990-1992: Acting Assistant Professor, University of Washington, Department of Statistics.
1983-1984: Teaching Fellow under Professors Arthur Dempster and Willis Davis, Harvard U. Dept. of Statistics.

Awards

2006, ETS Presidential recognition for volunteer work for efforts with Mentor Power, Inc.
2005, ETS Team award for participation in ICT (Information Communcations Technology) Literacy Assessment development team.
2003, ETS Bright Idea Award.

Almond, Steinberg and Mislevy[2002]

2000, NCME (with Robert J. Mislevy and Linda S. Steinberg) National Council on Measurement in Education Award for Outstanding Scientific or Technical Contribution to Educational Measurement.

Mislevy, Steinberg and Almond [2003]

1998, ETS (with Robert J. Mislevy and Linda S. Steinberg) New Product Development Award for Most Outstanding Breakthrough.

Publications

Books

Papers in Journals

Papers in Edited Collections

Presentations

Selected Technical Reports

Note: The ETS Research Report and Research Memorandum series are internally refereed.

Films

Computer Experience

Operating Systems UNIX (Solaris, Sun OS, MacOS X), MacOS, Apollo Aegis, VAX/VMS, Honeywell Multics
Languages Java, Lisp, CLOS, C/C++, Fortran, APL, Basic, Pascal, Prolog, Assembler (68000 and 8080), PHP, Perl, Postscript, TeX, XML
Statistics S/S-Plus/R, Lisp-Stat, ISP, GLIM, Minitab, IMSL, BUGS
Techniques Object-oriented design and analysis, User interface and human factors design (GUI), Artificial Intelligence, Rule-based programming, Constraint-based programming, Graphical Modelling, Language Design, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, and Databases.

Software Systems Designed

StatShop Suite of tools for statistical analaysis of Evidence Centered Design models, in particular Bayesian networks. Includes scoring engine (evidence accumulation process), calibrator (MCMC based) and data simulator. All input/output is XML based.
Asp Suite of tools written in R for accessing and manipulating StatShop data (both from intermediate databases and XML).
ACED (Adaptive Content with Evidence-based Diagnosis) A prototype systems for delivering customized diagnostic assessment. Responsible for task selction algorithm and Bayes net scoring engine (StatShop).
QTI Specification Active member of the IMS Global Consortium working group on Question and Test Interoperability. Key contributor to Version 1 XML specification development. http://www.imsglobal.org/question/
Evidence Accumulation Process An open architecture for supporting many possible scoring engines. Including number right and graphical model based scoring. Planned developments include discrete IRT and multivariate IRT models. Runs on Java 1.1 virtual machine (graphical model engine uses Win32 version of Ergo library).
Four Engine Delivery System A simple message passing architecture for implementing a modular assessment delivery system. The four processes do not need to be co-resident on the same computer and and both which processes are used and the message table can be customized for a particular architecture. Runs on Java 1.1 virtual machine.
Biomass Prototype Assessment Lead analyst/developer for a prototype web-delivered High School biology genetics assessment. Processes were implemented in Java, Visual Basic, IIS and Javascript. Includes a drag and drop library written in Java.
Portal Scoring Engine Graphical model based scoring system. Runs on Win32 (Windows NT/95/98).
NAEPVUE Prototype visual interface for analyzing NAEP data. Includes statistical advice and extensive data encyclopedia.
Definitions-Doc Software for extracting project documentation from XLISP-STAT projects.
Graphical-Belief Revised and extended version of Belief with many new capabilities and graphical user interface. Online walk through at: http://ralmond.net/gb/
ElToY Program for eliciting Bayesian conjugate prior distributions through constraint based dynamic graphics. Written in XLISP-STAT. Copies available via StatLib: http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/xlispstat/eltoy
Belief Program to manipulate graphical belief function models written in Common Lisp. Available via Carnegie Mellon Artificial Intelligence Repository: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/reasonng/probabl/belief/0.html

Documentation

Patents

Professional Activities

Program Chair 3rd Anual Applications Workshop at Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence conference, 2005. (Co-chair in 2006).
Program Committee Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2004; Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 1997, 1999, 2001.
Standards Bodies Working group member for IMS Consortium group on Question and Test Interoperability, 1999-2001.
Professional Memberships American Statistical Association, Association for Computing Machinery, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (associate member).

Community Service and Other Interests

2006--2007 Board of Directors of Mentor Power, Inc, a local non-profit, science-based, one-to-one mentor program that instpires, motivates, and empowers under served high school students to develop academic discipline, cirticial thinking and personal responsibility. http://www.mentorpowernj.org/

2004--2007Volunteer mentor with Mentor Power, NJ.

Storytelling, Music (small recorder ensembles, bassoon, curtal, shawm, composition), History of Music, Fencing, Blacksmithing and Armor Making, Bird and Nature Watching, Writing (Science Fiction and Game Design), and Medieval and Islamic History, Chinese and Japanese languages.

Other personal inforamtion including pictures of my twin daughters can be found at: http://ralmond.net/

Russell Almond, <lastname> (at) acm.org

Last modified: Jul 6, 2008