Danny Abramovitch

This is my personal web page based on the work that I do. I have spent the bulk of my career doing industrial research, mostly at Hewlett-Packard Labs, Agilent Labs, and in the Mass Spec Division of Agilent Technologies. The majority of this has been on understanding physical systems (loosely defined as things that move or have signals running around in them). This is as opposed to purely computer centric systems. However, since working as a Co-Op student at Milliken & Company's central headquarters, I have developed an appreciation for what knowing what good computing can do for a physical system.

Corporations large and small like their web pages to fall into a set format to give a consistent message to their customers. While this is logical, it is a little bit restrictive on the individual who wants folks to have easy access to the public portion of their work. So, after much delay, it made sense to generate my own web site.

My purpose is to make it easy for people to find out about my work. You won't find any proprietary information here, just things that have made it into the public eye, or are independent of the companies that I do and have worked for. My intent is to make this page content rich, rather than heavily stylized.

When asked to describe what I do, I have settled on three common threads:

• I work on difficult physical problems, and work to find their fracture points. That is, I try to understand the problems well enough and deeply enough to find out where they give way.

• I make difficult algorithms work on real time hardware. That is, I find a way to implement math that solves a physical problem in a way that can actually work on the physical system.

• I like to work problems from the physical system to the web page. That is, I know that understanding the physical system is key to presenting good information about it. That being said, unless I know how to get the useful information out and in a form that people can make use of it, then that knowledge can go to waste.

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I was born in Canada, grew up in Alabama, went to college at Clemson, spent 3 months in New Hampshire before coming out to Stanford for grad school. Now, if we meet at a party, you won't need a score card when you ask where I'm from originally.

If we'd stayed in Saskatoon, I probably would have been a hockey player. As it was, I grew up not far from the University of Alabama, where my father taught. The first time I went to a college football game, Bama crushed Vince Ferragamo and the Cal Bears 66-0. Still, one of my favorite memories from there is running in the coliseum where Bear Bryant would be walking in the halls. I was at Clemson during their 1980s football glory days and in Silicon Valley when the 49ers were pretty good. When I got to Stanford, football games were not a lot of fun, but they kind of are now under Coach Shaw. Now, Clemson is fun to watch again and Coach Swinney has changed the culture of the team and school. It does my heart good to know that Dabo Swinney and Dave Shaw are buddies.

I probably learned as much in my first few years after grad school as I learned in grad school. Not that the folks trying to teach me weren't good, I just was not matched up with doing pure theory. Getting into industry, I did some projects that beat the pants off of my thesis. It turned out that physical problems motivated a lot more theory for me that just staring at equations. Hey, live and learn.

I really like engineering. It's really the art of understanding how to build things. But I don't think that we engineers -- as a group -- do a good job of explaining ourselves. This is unfortunate as it gives others the chance to misinterpret what we do. Hopefully, I'll do a decent job of expressing myself in these pages. I like to tell high school students the following overly broad simplification. There are folks who like to do math for the simple beauty of math. They are, of course, mathematicians. Scientists use math to understand the world (and the universe) works. Engineers do math because they want to do something about it.

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• Technical Publications: A mostly complete list of the external technical publications that I have worked on in the past few years. There is also a printable version.

• Patents A mostly complete list of my patents. There is also a printable version.

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  A photo of Gene Franklin's group (students, alumni, and spouse) at the 1995 American Controls Conference in Seattle. From left to right that's Peter Witcor (Deedee's spouse), V.K. Jones, Deedee Meldrum, Danny Abramovitch, Lucy Pao, Paul Danelowski, and Gertrude and Gene Franklin.

  
  

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  A photo of several generations of Gene Franklin's former group members at the 2005 American Controls Conference in Portland, where Gene received the Bellman Award, which is the highest honor of the American Automatic Control Council. From left to right that's Lucy Pao, Stephen Philips, Gurcan Aral, Gene Franklin, Danny Abramovitch, and Abbas Emami-Naeni.

  
  

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