Willian Massami Watanabe

Front-end Web Engineer

As a Computer Science professor, stands as a passionate Web developer, lecturing development practices associated to Web technologies and Web engineering practices (such as: eXtreme Programming, TDD - Test-Driven Design, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery). Eager to contribute by developing quality assured Web applications, also considering attributes such as usability, maintenance and multi-platform characteristic of the Web.

Back to summary

Professional profile

Front-end developer experienced in the use of cutting edge technologies, with the objective of allowing rich interactions for users in the Web, exercising Web 2.0 and HTML5 core concepts.
Specialist in Web Engineering practices such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Test-Driven Design; for assuring the quality of large scale web projects.
Advanced knowledge in the area of computer interfaces design, with experience in the field of Web accessibility and usability issues.

Back to summary

Areas of expertise

Web engineering skills

Web standards (HTML, CSS, JS and others)
Web services, RESTFul and RPC (Remote Procedure Calls)
SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
High Performance in the Web Platform
Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
Cloud Computing (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS)
Web accessibility (WCAG 2.0 and WAI-ARIA)

Programming skills

JavaScript
Ajax Design patterns
Object Oriented JavaScript
Ajax Toolkits (jQuery, Dojo, YUI)
PHP
Python
Java (JSE and JEE)
Design patterns

Back to summary

Professional experience

Professor at UTFPR. Brazil 2012.: Computer Science professor with emphasis in Web Development, Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction.
Software enginner at Yahoo!. Brazil 2011-2012.: working specifically on two applications: Meme and Profile. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment strategies demand constant effort, while keeping the quality of continous delivery of features in the Web. Exercising Test-Driven Design, eXtreme Programming, Scrumm practices and dealing with performance and scalability non-functional requirements in Web systems.
Ph.D. CAPES Scholarship at São Paulo University - ICMC (Mathematics and Computer Science Institute). Brazil, 2010.: part of the of the Ph.D. program of ICMC-USP, with the project entitled "Automatic Accessibility Evaluation in RIA - Rich Internet Applications". This research was financed by CAPES and works in the area of Web Accessibility, Web Usability, Web Engineering, MDD, RIA - Rich Internet Applications and Ajax. The Ph.D. project was conducted under the orientation of Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.
Master of Science FAPESP Scholarship at São Paulo University - ICMC (Mathematics and Computer Science Institute). Brazil, 2008-2010: inserted at project PorSimples which was financed by FAPESP and Microsoft Research, was responsible by the integration of text processing operations and interface design of the Facilita. The Facilita is a web application that works as an assistive technology facilitating portuguese reading activities on web pages through the use of automatic text summarization and simplification techniques. Simple interactions, usability and accessibility issues are essential requirements to the Facilita implementation and are the main themes of the research. JavaScript and AJAX characteristics provide some of the key features of design's simplicity and usability in Facilita. The project was developed under orientation of Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.
Qualipso Scholarship at São Paulo University - ICMC (Mathematics and Computer Science Institute). Brazil, 2010-2010: the Qualipso - Quality Platform for Open Source Software project aims at elaboration a software maturity framework for Open Source Software (OMM - OpenSource Maturity Model). The Qualipso project has the objective of elaborating technologies, processes and policies that facilitate the development of Open Source quality assured software. The activities realized in the project involved the integration of different applications with the use of webservices technologies (RESTFul).
IT Analyst at Guenka Software Development. Brazil, 2007-2008: Part of the team responsible by the remote marketing software implementation, through the use of mobile devices, an optimized communication protocol (due to limitations of the mobile platform) and databases server applications. Collaborated in the development of a server applications that allowed other applications remote update through the use of XML-RPC.
ITI (Information Technology Initiation) CNPq Scholarship at Guenka Software Development. Brazil, 2006-2007: collaborated in the development of a communication channel between mobile devices and web servers. The communication was made between Java Servlet containners and mobile devices (Handhelds) with the use of XML-RPC to exchange server persistent data.
Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge Leader: managed a team participation on the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge of Mozilla. In this design challenge, our team proposed the development of Educational Facilita making use of teh Jetpack extensions framework for Firefox. We implemented a reading assistance browser extension using multiple Ajax technologies and other resources available in the Jetpack platform.
Google Student Award: success application in the Google Student Award for the 7th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 2010), in Raleigh USA co-located with the Ninteenth International World Wide Web Conference. The award granted financial support for the student to attend the W4A 2010 Conference.

Back to summary

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science, São Paulo University (ICMC-USP). São Carlos - SP, Brazil, 2014.
Master of Science in Computer Science, São Paulo University (ICMC-USP). São Carlos - SP, Brazil. Concluded in 2010.
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Londrina State University (UEL). Londrina - PR, Brazil, 2008.
First Certificate in English, University of Cambridge, 2002.
Network and Computer building and maintenance, Technology Education Center, IAPEC, Brazil, 2004.

Back to summary

Example Apps

javacmd: boilerplate structure for Java projects. It includes a single Makefile which automatically compile Java source code, generates jar executable files, calculates dependencies based in a single jar directory, runs JUnit tests, generates JPA - Java Persistence API configuration files and generates JEE - Java Enterprise Edition applications structure. The goal of this project is to ease the development of Java projects with no use of IDEs. It is similar to Maven, however much simplier, with no XML configuration files.
tabindex-counter: a CasperJS script which collects HTML attributes metrics from webpages. This script was used to investigate how a large amount of websites implement Focus Navigation requirements and whether these implementations are associated to ARIA specific design recommendations.
aria-check: a Firefox Addon built on top of the Addon-SDK. The Addon runs a generic test-suite, which searches for Tab Widgets implementations and evaluates whether it implements ARIA specification requirements. The ARIA specification describes the use of semantic markup (such as: roles, aria-labels, among others) and keyboard interaction mechanisms for making JavaScript based interface components accessible.
watinha.com homepage: this is a presentation project, which makes use of different web technologies to improve the user experience in the curriculum. The source code is fully available in Github. This project makes use of Jasmine, as a JavaScript testing framework; Zombie.js, to simulate the browser environment during the tests; JSLintr, to validate the JavaScript source code against the JSLint code standard; Mustache template engine, to generate the webpages from templates; YUI Compressor, to generate faster webpages with compressed JavaScript and CSS files; and a performance test, based on yslow agains the production environment of the application. For the command-line, it is used the PhantomJS version of the yslow in order to make the assertions from the command line, no browser interfaces need to make available.
Pyccuracy Accessibility Actions: The main objective of this project is to implement accessibility actions for the pyccuracy, web acceptance testing application. Pyccuracy makes use of natural language expressions to generate user stories and acceptance scenarios that are automatically run in the browser, evaluating the behaviour of all layers of a web application (server and client side-scripting). However pyccuracy still have not implemented actions that can be classified as accessible for disabled users like "tabbing navigation", focus possibility for interactive elements, landmarks and header navigation, among other actions. The goal of implementing accessibility actions for pyccuracy is to be able to execute acceptance tests of web applications functionality, considering disabled users task completion with assistive technologies. These users do no rely on the same visual and interactive mechanisms such as mouse and link colors, for example. So pyccuracy actions must consider these characteristics to guarantee that the functionality of the web application is available for all users. From the development perspective, accessibility actions drive automatic accessibility evaluation tools into a Continuous Integration environment. Making it possible to include accessibility non-functional requirements into the development life-cycle of projects and assisting developers while coding solutions for them.
Facilita: a web application that aims to automatically provide users with accessible content, through the use of text processing techniques (textual summarization and simplification). This application is being developed among with the PorSimples project. Simplicity of interaction and usability are some of the key features of this application. This application makes use of lots of Ajax Design patterns (like Cross-Domain Proxy, Fat Client, Multi-Stage Download, On-Demand Javascript) in order to provide the user with the best possible interaction. Facilita also makes use of distributed programming in order to deliver its functionality. The distributed programming is made with the use of multiple services which are integrated through RESTFul Service on the server side of the application. The installation and how to use tutorials are available on Facilita's page.
Educational Facilita: another web application that aims to automatically provide users with accessible textual content, through the use of Named Entities Recognition (automatically identifying proper nouns and others entities in the text) and Lexical Elaboration (providing users with simplier versions of the same word) techniques. The application identifies named entities in the text and then it provides the user with additional information about those entities. The additional informations are extracted from Wikipedia. The application also presents synonimous for words that are evaluated as complex or difficult to be understood. Educational Facilita was implemented as a Jetpack extension, and by doing so works as a browser plugin feature.
50 lines contest - Scale Tabs: Scale Tabs works as a browser extension that allows users find the browser tabs that they are looking for. This application was also developed using the Jetpack extension and makes use of the Browser layer of development in order to controll the tabs which are presented in the browser. It also uses Canvas in order to present snapshots of the tabs that are being accessed. This Firefox extension was implemented as part of the Jetpack 50 lines contest.
Scale Tabs: improved version of the 50 lines contest - Scale Tabs Jetpack addon. This addon release used the Addon-SDK (improved version and final release of the Jetpack prototype) and presents improved features (Address bar integration) and improved layout. Its source code is available in github.
YQL-Accessibility: YQL stands for Yahoo! Query Language, as a standard language for querying web resources. It presents a SQL-like syntax that enable queries to be made on RESTful webservices. YQL-Accessibility implements a set of tables (two for the moment) that allow these queries to be executed against web accessibility evaluation websites. It provides developers a simple way and unique way of identifying and reporting accessibility issues that are raised by automatic evaluation tools available in the Web.
NoRisk Planning: an interface prototype of an agenda like application for scheduling presentations of graduation projects in ICMC. This application uses the Dojo Toolkit in order to deliver rich UI Widgets within the interface and increment the usability and interaction of the interface. The presentations are offered to researches of the institute so that they can choose the topics and areas most familiar to them, with Adalberto Gonzaga Filho and Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.

Back to summary

Publications

Full paper: Keyboard navigation mechanisms in tab widgets: an investigation on ARIA's conformance. In SAC '14 Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. New York, NY, US : ACM - Association for Computing Machinery, 2014. v. 1. p. 721-726. With Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes and Rafael José Geraldo.
Full paper: An approach to improve accessibility and usability of existing web system. In SIGDOC '13 Proceedings of the 31st ACM international conference on Design of communication. New York, NY, US : ACM - Association for Computing Machinery, 2013. v. 1. p. 39-48. With Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes, Ana Luíza Dias and Paulo Cesar Masieiro.
Full paper: Using Acceptance Tests to Validate Accessibility Requirements in RIA. In W4A '12 Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility. New York, NY, US : ACM - Association for Computing Machinery, 2012. v. 1. p. 1-10. With Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes and Ana Luíza Dias.
Full paper: Usability evaluation of horizontal navigation bar with drop-down menus by middle aged adults. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM international conference on Design of communication (SIGDOC '11). New York, NY, US : ACM - Association for Computing Machinery, 2011. v. 1. p. 145-150. With Eduardo Pezutti Beletato dos Santos, Prof. Silvana Maria Affonso de Lara, Mário Castro and Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.
Full paper: The Link-Offset-Scale Mechanism for Improving the Usability of Touch Screen Displays on the Web. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, v. 6948, p. 356-372, 2011. With Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes and Maria da Graça Campos Pimentel.
Full paper: W4A 2010: a web accessibility conference report from the Google W4A student award winners.. SIGWEB Newsletter, Autumn (Sep. 2010). ACM - Association of Computing Machinery, 2010, New York - NY - US. p. 1 - 5. With Maia Naftali and David Sloan.
Extended paper: Adapting web content for low literacy readers by using lexical elaboration and named entities labeling. In New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Volume 16, Issue 3, 2010, Special Issue: Web Accessibility. With Arnaldo Candido Junior, Marcelo Adriano Amâncio, Matheus de Oliveira, Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes, Prof. Dr. Thiago Alexandre Salgueiro Pardo and Prof. Dra. Sandra Maria Aluísio.
Full paper: Adapting web content for low literacy readers by using lexical elaboration and named entities labeling. In proceedings of W4A 2010 - International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility. ACM - Association of Computing Machinery, 2010, Raleigh - NC - US. p. 1 - 9. With Arnaldo Candido Junior, Marcelo Adriano Amâncio, Matheus de Oliveira, Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes, Prof. Dr. Thiago Alexandre Salgueiro Pardo and Prof. Dra. Sandra Maria Aluísio.This event was co-located with WWW 2010 - 19th International World Wide Web Conference.
Short paper: Facilita: reading assistance to the functionally illiterate. In proceedings of W4A 2010 - International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility. ACM - Association of Computing Machinery, 2010, Raleigh - NC - US. p. 1 - 2. This event was co-located with WWW 2010 - 19th International World Wide Web Conference.
Full paper: WCAG Conformance approach based on Model-Driven Development and WebML. In proceedings of SIGDOC 2010 - ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. ACM - Association of Computing Machinery, 2010, São Carlos - SP - Brazil. p. 1 - 8. With David Fernandez Neto, Thiago Jabur Bittar and Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.
Full paper: Improving WCAG for the Elderly Web Accessibility. In proceedings of SIGDOC 2010 - ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. ACM - Association of Computing Machinery, 2010, São Carlos - SP - Brazil. p. 1 - 8. With Silvana Maria Affonso de Lara, Eduardo Pezutti Beletato dos Santos and Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.
Full paper: Facilita: Reading Assistance for Low-literacy Readers. . In proceedings of SIGDOC 2009 - ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. ACM - Association of Computing Machinery, 2009, Bloomington - IN - US. p. 29 - 36. With Arnaldo Candido Junior, Vinícius Rodriguez de Uzêda, Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes, Prof. Dr. Thiago Alexandre Salgueiro Pardo and Prof. Dra. Sandra Maria Aluísio.
Full paper: Web Communication and Interaction Modeling using Model-Driven Development. In proceedings of SIGDOC 2009 - ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. ACM - Association of Computing Machinery, 2009, Bloomington - IN - US. p. 193 - 197. With Thiago Jabur Bittar, Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes and Luanna Lopes Lobato.
Full paper: The Use of Automatic Techniques for evaluating usability in Multimodal Web interfaces project. In proceedings of XV Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas Multimídia e Web, 2009, Fortaleza - CE - Brazil. v. 2. p. 75-82. With Americo Talarico Neto, Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes and Alessandro Assis.
Short paper: Facilita: helping the reading of texts available on the Web. In proceeding of XV Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas Multimídia e Web, 2009, Fortaleza - CE - Brazil. v. 2. p. 27-30. With Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes, Prof. Dr. Thiago Alexandre Salgueiro Pardo and Prof. Dra. Sandra Maria Aluíso.
Extended abstract: RSS Content for mobile devices. In proceeding of XV Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas Multimídia e Web, 2009, Fortaleza - CE - Brazil. v. 2. p. 87-88. With David Fernandes Neto, Eduardo Pezutti Beletato dos Santos and Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.
Full paper: Systematic Review on accessible web application design principles for the functionally illiterate. In proceedings of SEMISH - XXXVI Seminário Integrado de Software e Hardware, 2009. CSBC - XXIX Congresso da Sociedade Brasileira da Computação, 2009, Bento Gonçalvez - RS - Brazil. With Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.
Technical report: Facilita's development. Available at: ICMC-USP library, p. 85. With Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.
Extended abstract: Rich Multimodal Interfaces components development with X+V and Dojo Widgets. In proceeding of XIV Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas Multimídia e Web, 2008, Vila Velha - ES - Brazil. v. 2. p. 97-100. With Americo Talarico Neto, Adalberto Gonzaga, and Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.

Back to summary

Presentations

Oral presentation: Adapting web content for low literacy readers by using lexical elaboration and named entities labeling. In W4A 2010 - International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility. ACM - Association of Computing Machinery, 2010, Raleigh - NC - US. This event was co-located with WWW 2010 - 19th International World Wide Web Conference.
Oral presentation: WCAG Conformance approach based on Model-Driven Development and WebML. In SIGDOC 2010 - ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. ACM - Association of Computing Machinery, 2010, São Carlos - SP - Brazil.
Oral presentation: Introduction to HTML5. In Enacomp 2010 - VIII Encontro Anual de Computação, 2010, Catalão, Goiá, Brazil.
Oral presentation: Dojo Toolkit and the Microsoft Research Experience. In Enacomp 2010 - VIII Encontro Anual de Computação, 2010, Catalão, Goiá, Brazil.
Oral presentation: Short course in JavaScript, Ajax and jQuery. In II Fórum de Tecnologia Fafibe, 2010, Bebedouro, SP, Brazil.
Oral presentation: Short course in JavaScript, Ajax and jQuery. In Semcomp 13, 2010, São Carlos, SP, Brazil.
Oral presentation: Evolution and Future of the Web: Web 2.0, AJAX and HTML5 Challenges. In Semcomp 13, 2010, São Carlos, SP, Brazil.
Oral presentation: Model-Driven Web Development. In Semcomp 13, 2010, São Carlos, SP, Brazil.
Oral presentation: Facilita: Reading Assistance for Low-literacy Readers. In SIGDOC 2009 - ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. ACM - Association of Computing Machinery, 2009, Bloomington - IN - US.
Oral presentation: Web Communication and Interaction Modeling using Model-Driven Development. In SIGDOC 2009 - ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. ACM - Association of Computing Machinery, 2009, Bloomington - IN - US.
Oral presentation: Systematic Review on accessible web application design principles for the functionally illiterate. In SEMISH - XXXVI Seminário Integrado de Software e Hardware, 2009. CSBC - XXIX Congresso da Sociedade Brasileira da Computação, 2009, Bento Gonçalvez - RS - Brazil.
Poster presentation: Rich Multimodal Interfaces components development with X+V and Dojo Widgets. In XIV Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas Multimídia e Web, 2008, Vila Velha - ES - Brazil.

Back to summary

Languages Speak

English (FCE - First Certificate in English, University of Cambridge, 2002)
Portuguese

Back to summary

References

Prof. Dra. Jandira Palma Guenka. PD&I Manager of Guenka Software Development. E-mail: jgpalma @ uel.br.
Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes. Associate Professor of Computer Science at São Paulo University. E-mail: renata @ icmc.usp.br.

Back to summary