Nicolas Kruchten

[email protected] | nicolas.kruchten.com

Work & Education

Jun 2023
(ongoing)
Hex
Visualization Lead

Working on Hex's visualization capabilities.

Jan 2022
(ongoing)
École de Technologie Supérieure
Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Software Engineering program, specializing in data visualization tools.

Jan 2018
to
Dec 2021
Plotly
VP Product

Product leadership for Plotly Graphing Libraries and Chart Studio product. Development of Plotly Express, contributions to Dash and Dash Enterprise.

Sep 2016
to
Dec 2017
Kruchten Engineering Services Ltd.
Consulting Product Manager, Software Developer and Data Scientist

Software engineering, data visualization, strategy consulting for healthcare analytics and people operations applications.

Sep 2010
to
Sep 2016
Datacratic
Senior Software Engineer, then Head of Product

First employee at Datacratic. Core contributor to RTBKit, RTB Optimizer and Email Optimizer products as Software Engineer then Head of Product Engineering. Finally Product Owner for Datacratic's Machine Learning Database (MLDB.ai) and part of the Data Science as a Service group.

Oct 2008
to
Aug 2010
Bell Mobility
Operational Performance Specialist

Developed business intelligence software for the Radio Access Network division to support process improvement initiatives by collecting, reconciling, analyzing and visualizing business metrics (network performance, unit costs, cycle times) from various enterprise databases. Received VP Award for innovative Value-Stream Mapping software to support an $800M network deployment, as well as numerous Peer-to-Peer Recognition Awards for various software tools.

Oct 2004
to
Oct 2008
Kruchten Engineering Services Ltd.
Software Engineer & Vice President

Co-founder and Principal of this profitable company, doing software/IT consulting. Two major contracts are detailed below, and others included the development of custom numerical analysis tools, online payment systems and content and contact management systems, as well as data-center selection and setup, for various clients throughout North America.

Apr 2005
to
Jun 2008 (contract)
Engineers Without Borders Canada
Director of Technology

Responsible for all major technology decisions and deployments for this dynamic young non-profit organization (50 staff, $2M budget), part of the 10-member management team. Led in-house development of numerous websites, databases and e-commerce systems. Major personal contributions included myEWB.ca, a mission-critical 10,000-user web application, as well as the championing of IT best practices, often credited for making EWB a sector-leader in IT.

Jan 2005
to
May 2007 (contract)
GTAModel Project, Ministry of Transportation of Ontario
Software Engineer

Provided software expertise for this large-scale travel demand model of the Greater Toronto Area, used by province and municipalities in planning. Major personal contributions included the modernization of architecture, data structures and algorithms over the previous version of this model.

Apr 2003
to
Dec 2003
University of Toronto Intelligent Transportation Systems Centre
Software Developer

Developed a powerful and flexible software framework (Galapagos) for running complex evolutionary algorithms distributed over dozens of workstations, in order to solve optimization problems in transportation. This work was documented in undergraduate thesis and later published (see below).

Sep 2000
to
May 2004
University of Toronto
Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc)

Engineering Science program, specialized in Intelligent Transportation Systems and Transportation Planning.

Open-Source Contributions

Publications

N. Kruchten, A. McNutt and M. McGuffin (2023). Metrics-Based Evaluation and Comparison of Visualization Notations. to appear in 2023 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS), 2023, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2308.16353.

N. Kruchten, J. Mease and D. Moritz (2022). VegaFusion: Automatic Server-Side Scaling for Interactive Vega Visualizations. 2022 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS), 2022, pp. 11-15, doi: 10.1109/VIS54862.2022.00011.

Roorda, M. J., Miller, E. J., & Kruchten, N. J. (2006). Incorporating Within-Household Interactions into Mode Choice Model with Genetic Algorithm for Parameter Estimation. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 1985, TRB, Washington DC, pp.171-179. doi: 10.3141/1985-19.

Abdulhai, B., Kruchten, N. J., & de Koning, D. (2004). Galapagos: Development Platform for Distributed Parallel Genetic Algorithms for Computationally Demanding ITS Optimization Problems. Paper presented at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board. Washington, DC. link