My work interests at Altera include all aspects of FPGAs: FPGA architecture and the design of interconnection networks, optimization algorithms on graphs for VLSI CAD targeting FPGAs, and applications of FPGAs in communications, DSP and reconfigurable computing.
Aside from FPGAs, I'm very interested in data analysis and learning more about data mining and machine learning. This year I read a fascinating book"Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran after it was recommended in Andreas Weigend's STAT 252 class (his podcasts are great too), and just cracked open "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" by Bishop (it won't be anywhere near as easy of a read, but I'm hoping it will be equally enjoyable).
Over the past 11 years, I have participated in the design of most of Altera's FPGA architectures including Apex, Stratix, Mercury, Cyclone and Max families. I also coordinate Altera's external research and funding with Universities. On the CAD side I have worked on placement, synthesis, and timing analysis algorithms. Most of this is available through publications and patents.
Recently, I returned to software development in the area of timing analysis, where I've also learned how much I still don't know about software engineering and object-oriented design.
I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1997 and before that my MMath and BMath degrees in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. My Ph.D. thesis advised by Jonathan Rose and Derek Corneil involved a graph-theoretic characterization of the properties of digital circuits for use in developing and evaluating heuristic CAD algorithms such as place&route and FPGA architectures. The circuit characterization (circ) and graph generation (gen) software is available for download. My Master's thesis with Anna Lubiw was in graph theory / graph drawing. In my co-op undergrad, I had work-terms at IBM (back when we wore suits every day), Bell-Northern Research (now Nortel), and Environment Canada.
This picture is from the top of the hill in Capri, Italy, in 2007.