Yan Cheng
Co-Founder
CTO

Mr. Cheng is a co-founder of OpenConcept Systems, Inc. He brings with him extensive software engineering experiences in the areas of large-scale web application architecture, data analysis and modeling, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and web services, Web 2.0 and social media. Prior to founding OpenConcept, he worked at AOL for 14 years. Being the most celebrated architect at AOL, Mr. Cheng has an incredible ability to translate ideas into sound architecture designs and flawless implementations. When software systems don’t work properly, Mr. Cheng would be called upon to investigate and straighten them out. From 2000 to 2009, Mr. Cheng was Chief Architect of Infrastructure Services and Web Publishing at AOL. Over the years, Mr. Cheng was instrumental in the architectural direction and system implementation at AOL. With extensive experiences in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Mr. Cheng successfully led the detailed definition and implementation of services and services interfaces for AOL Platforms. He built the SOA identify/security framework, Service Invocation Framework (SIF) to integrate different protocols, and services including, but not limited to, Authentication, Discovery, Categorization, and a set of financial services. Mr. Cheng spearheaded AOL’s Web 2.0 initiative by introducing systems that collect, aggregate, and analyze content consumption and user activities and then used the results to further guide user activities to increase consumer engagement. This laid the foundation for AOL’s migration to Web 2.0 and successfully made AOL news the most engaged news site. At a time when there was more than two dozen different ways to get an AOL user authenticated, Mr. Cheng led the effort to consolidate our authentication system into a centralized system that offers single sign-on, added security, and open standard for easy third party integration.

A seasoned architect and developer, Mr. Cheng has continued to challenge himself by learning the new trends in technology and the IT industry. He has an amazing ability to decompose a complicated problems into manageable components to ease the implementation of the systems and later the growth and maintenance of the systems.

Prior to AOL, Mr. Cheng was a Principal Engineer from 1990 to 1995 at Planning Research Corporation, where he worked as a Computer Graphics Specialist on Project 2851, which generated battle simulation databases for the Department of Defense. He was responsible for the design and implementation of computer algorithms for graphical operations needed by the data generation system. Mr. Cheng’s invention of a polygon-network-based clipping algorithm improved the system performance by over 100 fold. Mr. Cheng also worked on Project Advanced Weather Information Processing System (AWIPS) as a system architect. He worked with government technical team on the definitions of system requirement and design of the system architecture.

Mr. Cheng was a PhD candidate at the Computer Science Department of George Washington University. He earned a M.S. degree in Computer Science from George Washington University in Washington, DC and a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University in China.

Mr. Cheng is the author of one US patent.