Connor Young
Computer Engineer and Programmer

Introduction

I'm a computer engineering undergraduate student at University of Virginia in my 2nd year of study. I've targeted my curriculum towards programming and embedded systems, as these are two of my biggest interests in technology. I've also participated in several internship opportunities to further my knowledge in these areas.

Technical Experience

My first introduction to computer programming was through the FIRST Robotics Competition program. I was a main programmer for my team (122: NASA Knights) for the Logo Motion and Rebound Rumble games. During this time, I became familar with the National Instruments cRIO platform and LabVIEW programming language, as well as other programming languages (Java, C++, C#). I also played a significant part in the implementation of the electronics subsystem of our robots in both years.

After high school, I participated in an internship under the Naval Surface Warfare Center, working on developing sensor interfaces for live data acquisition and analysis systems that would be used to test the US Navy's fleet of combatant craft. Notably, I played a large part in programming the data acquisition system used to test one of the iterations of the prototype Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel (WAM-V). The data acquisition systems were built on the cRIO platform and programmed with LabVIEW.

The following summer, I took part in an internship at NASA's Langley Research Center. I worked with the Non Destructive Evaluation Sciences Branch there. Notably, I designed and tested a proof-of-concept prototype for a wire speed sensor on the Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication (EBF3) machine. Also in support of the EBF3, I developed a piece of software to correlate stereo image pairs and generate a 3-Dimensional model of the environment being examined. These projects involved the use of the LabVIEW, CUDA, Arduino and C++ languages. In addition, I became familiar with the Intel Thread Building Blocks library, the OpenCL library, and the Point Cloud Library. In addition to these main projects, I also participated in several other projects to lesser degrees, which involved sautering and assembly of PC's for use as high-performance data analysis systems.