Author bios
Design Science personnel often write articles that appear in peer-reviewed journals and trade magazines, or give presentations at conferences. This page provides
biographies of our authors.
Paul Topping
Paul Topping founded Design Science in 1986 and has held the
position of President and CEO ever since. Besides running the company, he is the
principal architect and original programmer of DSI's MathType product and
continues to provide considerable technical leadership at the company. Before
founding Design Science, Mr. Topping held various technical and managerial positions
within various Computer-aided Design and Computer-aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM)
companies, specializing in user interaction and programming language design.
Mr. Topping received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering 1974 from the University of
Southern California. Mr. Topping also did some graduate work in Computer Science at USC
and the University of California at Irvine.
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Robert Miner
Robert Miner received
his college education and subsequent graduate and post-graduate training at the
University of Maryland, Oxford, and Universität Bern. He focused on mathematics,
receiving a Ph.D. in 1991. In 1995, after teaching for four years at the
University of Oklahoma, Dr. Miner decided to move to the Geometry Center at the
University of Minnesota where he became involved in the World Wide Web
consortium initiative to standardize and XML markup language for mathematics. He
eventually co-chaired the technical working group that developed MathML. Dr.
Miner and two other researchers spun-off a company to commercialize the software
and web content developed at the Center, which was acquired by Design Science in
2000. Since then, Dr. Miner has worked to develop the MathPlayer and MathFlow
products, written and spoken extensively on the impact of MathML on technical
publishing, and initiated a research program on adding value to electronic math
content, including an NSF research grant awarded in 2003 to develop math-aware
searching.
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Steve Noble
Steve Noble is Director of Accessibility Policy for Design Science, Inc.,
where he is promoting math accessibility policy efforts. Past employment
includes leading State accessibility initiatives as Policy Analyst for the
Kentucky Assistive Technology program, and serving as Manager of Product
Development for Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. Mr. Noble received his MPA
in Public Policy at the University of Louisville. He serves on the national
Board of Directors for the Learning Disabilities Association of America, serves
as Editor-in-Chief for the journal Information Technology and Disabilities, and
is a member of the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS)
Development Committee.
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Neil Soiffer
Dr. Soiffer received his PhD in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley. He was
a member of Tektronix's Computer Research Lab, where he created experimental
math computation systems, math editors, and tools for embedded systems. Dr.
Soiffer moved to Wolfram Research, where he was responsible for a number of user
elements that are part of Mathematica, including the WYSIWYG math editor and
programmability of Mathematica's notebook interface. He joined Design Science in
2003 and has worked on math accessibility in their MathPlayer plug-in for
Internet Explorer. Dr. Soiffer was a principal architect of MathML and remains
active in the MathML working group. He led the DAISY committee that defined the
math extension to DAISY, and is actively working on accessible PDF documents as
a member of the PDF/UA working group. He was awarded NSF SBIR grant to make
electronic documents that contain math accessible.
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