John Sheehan

I am a Research Software Engineer at the IBM Research - Ireland center in Dublin.  I have an MSc in high performance computing from Trinity College Dublin, and a PhD in computational geophysics from Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies/University College Dublin.

Here at IBM, I have worked on a broad range of projects from edge devices, streaming analytics, IoT, cloud, to blockchain.

Some of the projects I worked on since I joined, include

• PowerEN. An international project to bring up an edge computing device - a multi threaded wire speed Power processor with a number of specialised coprocessors.  Initially, I was involved in designing, writing, and executing tests (C and Bash) for this project.  Later on, I worked on the device's Ethernet kernel driver.
• Traffic Monitoring. This was in collaboration with the Kenya Lab.  It involved designing and implementing a system to ingest and process location data. Watson IoT was used to ingest the location data, which was then streamed to back end storage.  I wrote operators in InfoSphere Streams/C++ to monitor the streaming data and perform geofencing on the location tuples.  If any of the tuples strayed outside the geofence, the event was tagged and recorded.
• Acoustics. This was a marine monitoring project in collaboration with the Marine Institute of Ireland.  It involved connecting to an offshore buoy and streaming 1MB/s of 250MHz audio data onshore to storage.  I wrote software to analyse the stream, and calculate octave bands and frequency bins on a per second interval.  This was initially written in InfoSphere Streams/C++ and later converted to C.
• Blockchain. I used ansible (python) to automate the deployment of Hyperledger Fabric across multiple vms in different data centers.  Additionally I built some poc smart contracts and clients in Go for Hyperledger Fabric.