Hello. My name is John Howard. I am a data scientist and biometrics researcher. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Bobby Lyle School of Engineering at Southern Methodist University. My thesis was Biometric Pattern Recognition Models for Identifying Subject Specific Match Probability, advised by Dr. Delores Etter.
My research interests are in biometrics, computer vision, machine learning, testing human machine interfaces, pattern recognition, and statistics. I enjoy working with the R programming language, specifically the dplyr and ggplot packages. I am a steadfast advocate for the concepts of reproducible research and think workflows that involve LaTeX, knitr, and/or RMarkdown are extremely powerful. However, I also enjoy more generic software engineering like using golang and docker to deploy microservice architectures on platforms like Kubernetes.
I am currently the lead data scientist at the Maryland Test Facility, where I do biometric related research. In my free time, I also do consulting work and enjoy teaching.