Nicolas
Ramirez

Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc.) - Biomedical & Computer Engineering Honours

Study Abroad Program - Product & Project Management Concentration

• Collaborated with Senior Technical Project Managers on activity tracking on Jira & Confluence, logging the progress of internal and external Agile cross-functional teams through various burndown charts.
• Led regular scrum meetings to identify, communicate, and resolve cross-company interdependencies using current work breakdown structures, time & cost estimation methods, and project retrospectives.
• Maintained accurate software vulnerability and risk assessment reports for several ongoing software release & development versions and ensured ISO quality standards were met.
• Developed company-wide scheduling & scope agreements with external stakeholders for the latest release.

• Engineered a Motorized Polarization Controller (MPC) in C on Texas Instruments Tiva C Series Microcontroller for automatic alignment of a model eye, handling serial communication via UART and ISRs for photo-interrupts.

• Managed a team of 27 multidisciplinary student leaders, a $30,000+ operating budget and aided Student Affairs with COVID-19 strategies, representing 1.1k engineering students to faculty, alumni and industry.
• Launched the first of its kind, student-led Tutoring & Mentorship programs, backed by the department director.
• Successfully hosted our largest annual career fair OpFair, through strong communication with shareholders, yielding $10,000, +300 students & +15 companies to recruit our students for internships amidst the pandemic.

• Developed a mobile application for our tracking device on Dart that implemented Google Maps API, serial communication and a variety of features including night-mode following a Model View Controller (MVC) design.
• Gathered feedback from potential customers to refine product requirement documentation & roadmap.
• Spearheaded our entry at the Coast Capital Venture Competition and was selected as Top Finalist ($1000 Award), due to deep market understanding, product design, go-to-market strategy and strong pitch.

• Built a multi-threaded memory allocator in C on Linux using shared data synchronization tools & various memory management techniques including best, worst, & first fit allocations, & memory compaction.
• Developed a custom syscall that returned information on a current process and all ancestor processes to ensure the efficient use of multiple processes working in parallel and safe memory access in user and kernel spaces.

• Implemented a Command Line Interface (CLI) application that uses SQL to handle requests in plain English for borrowing, returning, and managing library items, customer records, events, and fines.
• Designed a fully normalized database structure ensuring data integrity and avoiding anomalies by following Boyce-Codd Normal Form principles and a comprehensive ER design.

• Developed a desktop game in Python, based on the Battleship board game with new attacks and ships.
• Implemented key gameplay features and game state management, including player actions, AI interactions, and game state transitions, ensuring data integrity and smooth gameplay continuity.
• Followed creational, structural and behaviour software design patterns, ensuring efficient software architecture while obeying the Gestalt principles for intuitive UI Design.
• Designed and implemented efficient save/load functionality and database interactions to ensure reliable data storage and retrieval.

• Designed and integrated advanced adversarial search algorithms in Python, including MinMax with Cutoff Depth, AlphaBeta Pruning, and MonteCarlo Tree Search to enhance the difficulty of an AI opponent.
• Created a sophisticated evaluation function to assess board configurations for their winning potential.
• Coded GUI features to manage search time and depth, enabling iterative deepening and ensuring responsive gameplay for larger board sizes.

• Utilized Python, Keras, and Tensorflow to investigate the viability of CNNs to correctly classify hematopoietic cells from 945 human patients from 171,374 MRI images.
• Identified architecture & hyperparameters that reduced over-fitting and promoted generalization of our model.
• Implemented data augmentation models, including geometric transformations, to reduce dataset imbalances and increase the F1 score of band neutrophil cells by 18%.

• Utilized ARM7 assembly programming language to develop a series of low-level projects including developing interrupt service routines & Fibonacci counters while using timer interrupts & pulse-width modulation for optimal Hardware/Software co-design.

• Coded an implementation of the ymodem file transfer protocol in C++ using multithreading & designing test cases to ensure the development of a robust protocol that is resilient to data corruption.
• Improved the professor’s project library code and upgraded the thread management features.