A Publication for West Coast Alumni and Friends
Vol. 2, No. 2 / August 2003

Bleary-Eyed Memories of Leading-Edge Technology

"My WPI days stand me in good stead. Now I must work with others, present ideas, and actually teach in a technical and business setting."

As 1998 drew to a close, Eric Billingsley '95 was bleary-eyed, but happy. Toiling night and day for three weeks during the Christmas season, he'd led a team that built the Internet portal my.altavista.com. "We were pressing to sign contracts and code for news feeds, horoscopes, weather, stock quotes, sport scores, you name it--and we got it done."

Billingsley, now a principal engineer at eBay, the eight-year-old San Jose Internet auction company, says he learned as a WPI undergraduate both the self-sufficiency and teamwork skills that proved indispensable to the success of the project. "My WPI days stand me in good stead," he says. "Now I must work with others, present ideas, and actually teach in a technical and business setting."

Sunny California seems a long way from rural Tennessee, where Billingsley grew up. His parents worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, his mother as a secretary and his stepfather as an electrician. He grew up understanding radiation exposure and the history of the atomic bomb. "I always wanted to become a nuclear engineer," he says, "do physics and conduct nuclear research."

He came to WPI to earn his B.S. in nuclear engineering when he found that the university is among a few colleges operating a nuclear reactor. The reactor "became my second home and I earned an operator's license in my sophomore year." He went on to serve as the radiation safety officer. That job would prove to be the starting point for his future career.

Faced with the laborious and tedious job of handling and filing the monthly updates to rules and regulations the reactor received from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Billingsley began putting the documents on a Web site, which he showed to the NRC. "They liked it," he says, "and authorized its use. Then, while pursuing my WPI master's degree, I set up a Web site where other schools with nuclear engineering programs learned from WPI policies and procedures, and vice versa. Everyone traded ideas."

Today, as one of four members of the advanced technology group in eBay's research and development department, Billingsley develops technologies for new features to help the Web site's users. He also focuses on data mining and trust and safety matters, as well as computational linguistics. Recently, his job left him bleary-eyed again. With its five-year-old software reaching its limit, eBay, the world's fastest growing Web site, needed a new search engine. So it was back to snatching the occasional sustaining nap for Billingsley as he worked with AltaVista founder Louis Monier to produce a successful spring launch.

Some of eBay's Web site improvements came this year courtesy of WPI's Silicon Valley Project Center. Three teams, each with three WPI students, completed projects that strengthened by 80 percent a system that prevents the penetration of malicious programs; determined how to detect performance, accuracy and efficiency factors when changes or upgrades are made to the company's search engine; and analyzed the relationships of search words fitting certain categories and developed a spell-check algorithm for the eBay site.

From such teamwork can come a clear head--and future bleary eyes.