Michael Breen

Michael Breen has a long history of being involved in web development and took on his first position as “Webmaster” for a local Pittsburgh ISP in 1995. He’s been running his own Linux servers ever since, and has helped keep the servers running at Exaltation of Larks since 2009.

Along with web development, Michael has worked in a wide range of areas in software development, including speech recognition, biotech, and video games. In addition to Drupal’s native PHP, Michael is an accomplished programmer in other languages including bash, C, C++, Perl and Ruby, and has worked extensively with Drupal, Magento and Ruby on Rails.

Passion for music led him to take a position at Berklee’s College of Music, where he developed a social network in Ruby on Rails similar to Facebook (including walls, profiles and discussion groups) for the school’s students, faculty, staff and alumni. He also implemented Apache Solr and developed new workflows and administration backends for the school’s alumni office.

In the video games industry, he worked at Demiurge Studio on titles such as Metal of Honor: Airborne, America’s Army, Advent Rising, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as well as Damnation, a Prince of Persia-like 3D platformer.

Michael’s speech recognition work at Autonomy Virage was more research-oriented, where he worked on projects such as detecting anger in an snippet of speech, or classifying an audio sample according to what language was being spoken. Autonomy Virage’s video search technology is now used by BBC, Sony, CNN, MGM, Sky, Bloomberg, Paramount, Fox, ESPN, CBS and France 2 to name a few.