About Me
I'm Zachary Lazzara, a Computer Scientist. I have a wide range of interests in technology (both theoretical and proven), including mind upload/whole brain emulation, artificial intelligence/machine learning, robotics, space exploration, and much more. Please check out my LinkedIn for the most up to date information on my skills and experiences.
Education
Honours Bachelor of Computer Science (Mobile Computing) HBSc May 2020 — December 2022
Sheridan College, Oakville, ON
Computer Systems Technology Systems Analyst (co-op) Diploma January 2014 — April 2017
Sheridan College, Oakville, ON
Work Experience
Entrepreneur
EDGEMay 2021 - August 2021 (4 month internship)
My responsibilities during my internship at EDGE were to come up with an idea for a product, perform market research to validate my idea, create a business plan, develop a minimum viable product, and create a presentation demonstrating my product and communicating my business plan. My product idea was an iPad app which can assist students with the literature review portion of their thesis. For my minimum viable product I built a system which could compare two PDF documents sentence by sentence, using natural language processing to extract potentially relevant sentences from the referenced paper. The system would also compare the sentiment of sentences in order to determine whether or not a given sentence supported the statement it was matched with, allowing users to see both supporting statements and opposing statements.
Research Assistant
Sheridan CollegeApril 2018 - August 2018 (5 month contract)
Upon graduating from Sheridan College I came back for a short while to assist with the paper the professors were writing on what we learned through the indoor location service project. I helped source citations and conducted further research on the topic, to help explain the results we saw with respect to the results others have published. You can find the paper on IEEE Xplore here: A New Set of Bluetooth-Based Fingerprinting Algorithms for Indoor Location Services
Mobile Developer/Research Assistant
Sheridan CollegeMarch 2017 - June 2017 (4 month co-op)
During my second co-op at Sheridan College, my duties were to research various wireless communication technologies, and determine which technology would be best suited to provide an indoor location service. After conducting some research I recommended using Bluetooth, due to the high availability of low cost Bluetooth beacons. I then began developing the indoor location service on Android, using the Bluetooth beacons as anchor points and trilateration to determine the device's position, as well as researching and recommending other positioning methods we might look into in the future.
Mobile/Web Developer
Sheridan CollegeMarch 2016 - June 2016 (4 month co-op)
During my fist co-op at Sheridan College, my duties were to research the 7 dimensions of wellness and figure out how to best create an application or web portal centred around wellness. After my initial research it was then my duty to create wireframes to plan out the application/web portal. From there I then began developing a prototype Android application, which would later be handed off to the next co-op student.
Quality Assurance Analyst
Asigra IncMarch 2015 - June 2015 (4 month co-op)
During my time at Asigra Inc., I performed quality assurance testing on their backup software suite. My duties at Asigra included setting up a virtual machine network, which I used to test Asigra software on Windows, Mac, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with some systems acting as clients and others as servers. I would then open a ticket on BugZilla, detailing various issues such as usability issues, spelling errors, and bugs present in the software. During downtime I automated the installation of some of Asigra's software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I also worked toward automating some of the regression testing.