Welcome to the personal website of

Shawn N. Sydia


About Shawn

Hello, World!


My name is Shawn, and I come from small town Alberta. In pursuing higher education, I had set out in life to make a difference. After taking my first introductory computing science class on a whim, I immediately fell in love with the world of computing science. From the most complex algorithms to the simplest data structures, there was nothing that didn’t excite me.

Having a particular interest in software engineering, I hope to learn about the world of artificial intelligence, cryptography, and parallel computing. For my career aspirations, my mission is simple:

“Make the world a better place, one function(); at a time”.

Apart from programming, my hobbies and interests include mountain biking, playing guitar, writing music, and reading about anything scientific. And I never miss the opportunity to play a game of dodgeball!

As you may have already noticed, I am very passionate about programming and creating intricate solutions to challenging problems, issues which trouble the world, or things which are just totally cool. This lead me to joining the University of Alberta Aerial Robotics Group, in which we develop a flying robot capable of autonomously executing various tasks in a competitive environent. In this diverse and interdisciplinary group, I am a member of our Image Recogniton team in which we are developing the Image Recognition System (IRS) to perceive, distinguish, and react accordingly to various ground based targets. For a brief rundown, we are implimenting a convolutional neural network which will be trained on a combination of real-life and simulated training images. During flight our IRS will continuously scan for various targets and send over the image data via WiFi to the ground based Mission Control Planner, which in turn analyses the given data and calculates an optimal mission plan, which is then sent back to the UAV's AutoPilot system to execute the mission plan in a safe and efficient matter. My responsibiltiy in this team includes requirements gathering and development planning in order to prioritize software goals over our continuous integration and year-to-year iterations, developing and optimizing the neural network for time and system resource efficiency while maintaining accurate recognition capabilities, and mentoring our lesser experienced members in general programming ability, proper software development, and working within a team environment.

Apart from programming, I have a broad range of hobbies and interests. I love to play guitar. I play a variety of music, but I specialize in Fingerstyle. I love to write my own songs as well. In addition to playing and writing music, I love to read about anything scientific, although I do have a preference for computing science, pharmacology, and astrophysics and cosmology. My greatest passion in life is to learn, and naturally those two things go hand-in-hand with each other. But apart from broadening my knowledge, I like to go mountain biking, excersize, write poetry, and among other things... I never turn down a game of Mario Kart 😉


What do I know

Technologies I've used


Project Highlights


Android Group Project: MoodMobile

Created a social networking app where users can share moods.

Introduction Video

CUDA Lab: Image Convolution

Wrote an image convolution kernel using the CUDA parellel computing platform.

Project: Gomoku69

Wrote an MCTS based player for the game of Gomoku.

Partner Project: Chat379

Wrote client and server programs for an instant messaging chat service.

Let's Get In Touch!


Ready to start your next project with me? That's great! Give me a call or send me an email and I will get back to you as soon as possible!