Omar Bohsali: Personal Page and Portfolio

me, photo by Fuad.

welcome

My name is Omar Bohsali. Welcome to my personal page. I created this page so you can get a good picture of who I am and what I like to do.

Are you looking to contact me? You can call +1 571 249 1508, or skype omar.bohsali.

I will change the world in a positive way. Whether this be through a new venture that make someone's life better or a simple concept that solves a problem, I'm interested. The free hand of the market tends to help those who help others.

Are you an employer? Here is my most current resumé.

my work

Here are some projects I've been involved with in the past few years.

fratmusic - a college music website.

Two friends and I started a music website called FratMusic.com. FratMusic is a simple concept: it plays good music. I wrote the website in Django and scaled it with nginx and memcached.

divvyshot- simple group photo sharing.

I've had the honor of working with Sam Odio on Divvyshot, Y-Combinator-backed startup. I wrote a Python API that allowed client applications to plug into the service. The code is open-sourced on GitHub.

Divvyshot was acquired by Facebook in April 2010.

HitWarrior - Taking care of click fraud.

During my first year of college, I tried to solve click fraud. The service was eventually obviated by Google, but I don't regret this project as it sparked my interests in statistics and data mining.

The Trend

I've done a fair bit of coding and software development already and continue to do so.

I'm currently diversifying my technical interests by going deeper into statistics, machine learning, visualization, and data mining.

Data is interesting.

Aside from these technical endeavors, I've made sure to also gain experience with larger teams in different settings. I think it's critical to be focused on an expertise, but also well-balanced.

Algorithms Research Corporation, Charlottesville, VA

I tested automated financial trading strategies with Algorithms Research Corporation for a summer internship. I learned a fair bit about quantitative finance by testing MGARCH trading strategies via paper-trading.

Network Solutions, LLC
Herndon, VA

My summer internship with Network Solutions involved benchmarking and testing the performance of web-based graphing libraries. These results were put to use in selecting a library for Network Solutions' Site-meter product offerings; similar to Google Analytics.

Aid-Networks Inc. (now DataDyne)
Silver Spring, MD

I did systems integrity testing for a patient monitoring system. This system was one-of-a-kind: it used the Zigbee (802.15) standard in mesh networks to monitor patients in realtime.

Currently, nurses check up on patients once every several hours. During this time, patients may lose consciousness, unnoticed by nurses. Aid-N's offerings give a real-time status of patients at all times, saving lives, and reducing operational costs.

Yeah Systems, LLC
Washington, DC

Yeah Systems is a company a friend and I founded in Fall 2006. Since then, it has evolved from a dorm-room idea into a consulting firm that works with clients all over the world. We offer end-to-end brand and IT consulting at competitive rates.

We scaled our company to four employees and an outsource team. Our revenues doubled consistently for three years.

University of Virginia
School of Engineering and Applied Science, Charlottesville, Virginia
Bachelors of Science in Systems Engineering, Minor in Engineering Business

UVa is pretty beautiful, year round.

Academics

In May 2010, I graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Systems Engineering. The UVa Systems & Information Engineering (SIE) department focuses on a problem solving with a focus on:

Optimization
Statistics & Analytics
Risk Management
Systems Modeling and Forecasting
Mathematics & Physics
Stochastic Processes & Chaos Theory

Research

During my time at The University, I completed four research projects.

Modeling Portfolio Value at Risk (VaR) as a Fractal Distribution - Full Text
While doing a financial summer internship, I found that the mathematical tools used to model risk in a portfolio of financial securities do not adequately consider the occurrence of extreme events (tail risk). This under-representation is due to the Gaussian distribution, which overestimates likely events and significantly under-estimates unlikely ones.

I circumvented this issue by modeling risk as a Zipf distribution, a distribution normally used in semantic and text analysis.
The Economic and Social Viability of the Islamic Finance Industry, understood through Actor Network Theory - Full Text.
Islamic Finance is a popular subject in today's financial world. Despite this popularity, I feel that few people understand how it actually works and generates a sustainable profit. In this paper, I use actor-network theory to argue that the Islamic Financial Institutions make a profit by sharing information symmetries with other market participants.
Predicting Top-40 Music Success based on Lyrical Content
Everybody loves popular top-40 radio music. I was interested in why this is, on a semantic level. I mined the lyrics for popular songs that appeared on the American Top 40 billboard and correlated their lyrical content with the number of times they appeared on the American Top 40 radio show. Interestingly enough, there are certain chains of words that appear in highly popular songs.
Piercing the Veil of Anonymous Online Financial Transactions (OFTs)
Law enforcement agencies face a unique problem: cyber criminals are able to anonymously exchange financial resources, hiding virtually all traces of evidence in a complex web of financial services.

The focus of project project was to increase the understanding of anonymous financial networks by developing a standardized identity framework, creating of a comprehensive database of OFT services, and to performing a high-level survey of this space to identify the channels that are most vulnerable to fraud and money-laundering.

Affiliations

I was a member of Rodman Scholars Engineering Program, an honor bestowed to the top 5% of each year's engineering class. I'm a member of the International Council of Systems Engineers (INCOSE) and the Arab Student Organization.

The Chemistree 5k was a great success.

Terry Moore Scholarship Foundation

In October 2007, two friends and I founded the Terry Moore Scholarship Foundation (TMSF). Mr. Moore was my AP Chemistry teacher in high school and passed away in the fall of 2007 after a strong fight against a brain tumor. We run a 5k race every year and hold various community events to raise money for the scholarship.

The TMSF scholarship is given to a senior at McLean High School who shows a genuine curiosity for science and continues Mr. Moore's legacy. For Moore (ha.. ha) information, please contact Raedun Knutsen.

Eta Lambda Chi

HAX is a society for entrepreneurially minded students at the University of Virginia. Eta Lambda Chi has now expanded in the San Francisco Bay Area: one in Palo Alto and another in the city itself.

Music

at .. work?

I spin house, trance, electro, international, and a little bit of hip hop. I've gone digital and mix with a Hercules RMX dj console, an Akai MPD24, and Ableton Live / Reason on my computer.

Music is a hobby for me. I really enjoy listening to and making music of my own. Want to see what I'm listening to? See my last.fm page. Bookings? Email.

Statistics & Simulation: Matlab, R, @Risk, Arena, Minitab, a little bit of SAS/SPSS.
Web: django, ruby on rails.
Languages: Python, Java, C/C#, learning Haskell, French, Arabic, English

Thanks for looking

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

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