Date: Dec 16, 2013 Author: press release Source: Company Data (
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Woburn, Mass. -- December 16, 2013 -- Aptima, Inc., a leader in human-centered engineering, presented its annual Achievement Awards on Thursday, December 12, 2013. The Awards are meant to convey the company's appreciation to individuals, teams, and groups of employees that perform above and beyond reasonable job expectation, contribute promising innovative ideas, or demonstrate exceptional leadership qualities. Nominations can be submitted by any Aptima employee and winners are selected by employee committees that change from year to year.
Best Paper
The Best Paper Award recognizes excellence in preparing written products that disseminate Aptima's work to a broader audience beyond employees and the company's immediate customers. This year's Award went to Kent Halverson, Jonathan Lansey, Shawn Weil, and Ian Yohai for their paper entitled, "A Multimodal Approach to Measuring Behavior in Social Interaction" presented at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference (I/ITSEC), Orlando, Florida, 2-5 December 2013.
Best Teamwork
For the first time in the history of the Aptima Achievement Awards, the Best Teamwork Award resulted in a tie between two hardworking and innovative teams: the ASA™ Team and the Project Management Tool Selection DAR Team. The Best Teamwork Award recognizes cooperative groups that achieve Company goals or objectives of material value and quality by 1) pooling their complementary skills and knowledge, 2) holding each other personally responsible for doing their individual fair share of work, and 3) accepting mutual accountability for the ultimate outcome of their efforts.
The ASA Team: Alex Agnello, David Cade, Lisa Dang, Adam Dziki, Dan Howard, Ryan Marceau, Evan Simons, Mike Tolland, and Zack Zuzack
The Aâ–ªMeasure Service Application (ASA) Aptima's framework for aggregating performance measurement data from disparate systems and is a key component of many major current efforts at the company. The Team was recognized for developing the ASA in a way that met the immediate project needs while also leading to a reusable product that will meet the anticipated demands of near term future.
The Project Management (PM) Tool Selection DAR Team: Joel D'Arrigo, Jared Freeman, Zack Horn, Ryan Marceau, Diane Miller, Brian Riordan, Kevin Sullivan, Seamus Sullivan, Mike Tolland, and Alex Walker
This team performed a comprehensive Decision Analysis & Resolution (DAR) to identify the most suitable Project Management tool to be used across Aptima. The PM Tool DAR effort was an early application of a newly defined CMMI-based organizational best practice that can be applied across all business functions. Use of the recommended PM tool will enable Aptima's Project Managers to manage projects in a more consistent, efficient, and cost effective manner.
Outstanding Initiative
Recognizing Aptima employees who pro-actively develop and successfully implement a new idea, this year's Outstanding Initiative Award went to Scott Pappada and Ron Storm. Having identified one of Aptima's first commercialization efforts in the new, emerging market of glucose analysis, they set up a spin off-company and obtained a Third Frontier grant from the State of Ohio for the sum of $100,000. For more information, see the related story at http://www.aptima.com/news/2013/aptima-subsidiary-selected-ohio-third-frontier-technology-validation-and-start-fund-awardee.
Best Technical Achievement
This Award is intended to acknowledge outstanding performance within the structure of ongoing projects in the area of research and development. This year's winners were the members of Aptima's Intelligent Interactive Systems (I2S) Capability: Sylvain Bruni, Dustin Burke, Adam Fouse, Gabe Ganberg, Stacy Pfautz, amd Caroline Ziemkiewicz. The I2S Capability Team developed the architecture, services, and components with the successful application and demonstration in more than four Phase I and Phase II SBIR projects.
Mentor of the Year
Senior Scientist Camilla Knott was named Mentor of the Year. This award recognizes an Aptima employee who pro-actively develops and is genuinely committed to an employee's growth, development, and cultural integration into the organization.
Innovative Patent Application
The Innovative Patent Application Award recognizes excellence in the area of research and development by an employee or a group of employees by acknowledging outstanding innovative inventions developed at Aptima. This year's winners were Georgiy Levchuk and Charlotte Shabarekh for their patent application entitled, "Systems and Methods for Network Pattern Matching." This invention involves embodiments of systems and methods for network pattern matching to provide the ability to match hidden networks from noisy data sources using probabilistic multi-attribute graph matching analysis.
