XUANCONG WEN
33 ELGIN PARK
APARTMENT #7
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103
(415)881-7448
SAM@SAMWEN.COM
Profile
Self-motivated electrical and computer engineer, recently graduated from Washington University in Saint Louis, and currently pursuing Master Degrees in these same fields. Proficient in most industry standard tools, but is a quick and willing learner of new tools and techniques. I am always pursuing opportunities to innovate and invent with an eye to detail and design.
Experience Highlights
Owner, samwen.com; Saint Louis, MO; 2009 – Current
Projects that interest me in particular, and various blogs and collections that I maintain.
Engineer, Square Inc; San Francisco, CA; 2009 – Current
Responsible for hardware integration and signal processing for Square payment card readers. Part of the Android and iPhone client teams, and part time development for the web team.
Design and Analysis Engineer, Boeing IDS; Saint Charles, MO; 2008 – 2009
Worked on Mil-Std-1553 protocol and Fibre Channel Protocol weapons systems. Also used RS422 and RS488 communications standards. I worked on test equipment for various weapons systems, and built the hardware and software for field and factory versions.
Software Engineer, Raytheon; Falls Church, VA; 2008 – 2008
Worked on a pool-of-threads model for implementing a massively multi-threaded command and control software for the US military. This software is used with military UAVs.
Software Engineering Contractor, Army Research Lab; Adelphi, MD; 2002 – 2008
Completed a software upgrade for the Acoustic Comparative Analysis program, where different audio signatures are analyzed to identify ground and air vehicles. Also created the software front-end to an algorithm designed to use image processing to identify silhouettes of vehicles. A publication also resulted from work on multi-modal sensing technologies and integration: An Overview of ARL’s Multimodal Signatures Database and Web Interface, by Kelly Bennett, Xuancong (Sam) Wen, and James Robertson. This was published December of 2007 at the Army Research Lab. The time spent here were internships and a short contractor period.
Education
- Washington University in Saint Louis – B.S. in Electrical Engineering 2004 – 2008
- Washington University in Saint Louis – B.S. in Computer Engineering 2004 – 2008
- Washington University in Saint Louis – 1 semester, M.S. in Electrical Engineering (On Hold)
- Washington University in Saint Louis – 1 semester, M.S. in Computer Engineering (On Hold)
Relevant Coursework
Designed and built a 10 band audio equalizer on a Nu Horizons development board. Samples are retrieved at 50kHz, and must be processed at the same rate on a 50MHz crystal. Optimization techniques were thoroughly explored in this exercise.
Worked with Dr. Carl Bassi at the University of Missouri of Saint Louis to design an automated Visual Acuity Testing for the One Laptop Per Child Organization. This software was written in Python, and uses the Sugar APIs to integrate with the XO laptop. It will utilize the webcam and ad hoc networking to transmit third world data back to Dr. Bassi for studying the visual acuity of the third world. I was awarded the Rick Grodsky ESE Award for Technical Achievement on April 17, 2008 at Washington University in Saint Louis for this project.
Designed and built a low-cost, infrared camera-based, multi-touch input system that transmits information over Bluetooth. This was done using a Wii remote, connected to a computer via Bluetooth, with custom drivers written in C# to control input. Unfortunately, the base operating system had no paradigm to deal with such input, so a custom painting application was built as a proof of concept. Problems encountered in this system was the inability to distinguish between distinct inputs once they became close, sometimes resulting in crosstalk. This would require further investigation.
Designed and built the hardware, software, and firmware on an advanced, USB oscilloscope with 0-100% triggering at 1% increments, and operating at 200 MSamples/sec. Designed an innovative user interface for viewing signals in C#.
Skills
Technologies
- C/C++
- Java
- C#
- Perl
- PHP
- Visual Basic 6
- Visual Basic 7
- Structural Assembly
- BASH
- Javascript
- JSP
- nesC
- Objective-C
- Ada83
- CSS
- HTML
- Verilog
- VHDL
- Cocoa and Cocoa Touch
- Android SDK
Software
- Matlab
- LabView
- Mathematica
- Berkeley SPICE
- Xilinx ISE
- Modelsim
- Microsoft Visual Studio
- GCC and GDB
- Eclipse
- Netbeans
- XCode
- IntelliJ Idea
- CVS, Subversion, Git, and Mercurial
Familiar with most flavors of Linux and Unix, Windows, and OS X.