Shane O'Connell

LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
Toronto, Canada

Objective

My goal is to find employment income, as well as a group of like-minded people to work on engineering problems. I would prefer to work on a team that is trying to accomplish something that is considered technically difficult. I am open to working on many different types of engineering problems. I have a lot of specific experience related to FPGAs, in particular writing RTL designed to be run on FPGAs, as well as general software engineering. I feel confident in my ability to optimize complicated codebases for performance, regardless of whether they are written in software or they are hardware designs written in RTL.

I particularly like the idea of working on technology related to cultured meat, medical treatments, artificial intelligence, semiconductor device fabrication, 3D printing, robotics or space exploration. I think these fields sound interesting and in many cases are technologies that I personally want to take advantage of, so I like the idea of trying to help them improve quickly. However, some of them seem like they might not necessarily involve optimizing complicated codebases for performance, so it is difficult for me to predict whether there would be specific roles that I would enjoy. I also might be interested in any job related to systems programming, particularly operating systems and compilers, or possibly roles related to computer graphics. If there was somewhere I could work that had different teams working on more than one of the fields that I find interesting, and I could switch between them over time or at least follow their work closely, I would find that appealing.

I would prefer to work somewhere where they felt that it was important to hire a significant number of women.

Personally, I think the government should provide free food and rent for the entire population, so that large numbers of people who are interested in technology however do not have previous work experience could work on important technologies in parallel and be paid upon successful implementation of the technologies, rather than be paid a salary which I feel encourages people to work slowly. I have a page on my website describing how the government could afford to provide free food and rent for everyone, and a page on my website describing why salaried employees at corporations often have an incentive to work slowly. I feel like this is a pretty important consideration for trying to accelerate improvements in cultured meat and medical treatments in particular, due to the ethical problems that result from doing those things slowly. I have a page on my website demonstrating that it is possible for people without previous work experience to use AI in order to learn how to implement cultured meat.

I have a page on my website describing a series of frustrating experiences that I had during my last few years of employment, and it would mean a lot to me if I were able to find a social group that was able to empathize and understand how I feel about the things that I describe on the page. That page, as well as my resume, currently reference a disagreement that I had with my former coworkers with regards to a paper that Intel published in which my name was removed. I feel conflicted about this because I do not want future employers to think that I would publicly complain if I had a minor disagreement with them. The fact that my name was removed, along with a few other things that have occurred, have caused me to be worried that there might be a lot of people who dislike me, and so I want to be able to present my point of view in case there is any false information about me that might cause me to be unable to find another job. I expect this to be a one-time thing if I can find some other social group where I fit in. I also plan to update my website and deemphasize the parts that reference it at some point, especially if I am on good terms with my former coworkers again. If you read the page about being trapped in my apartment, I hope you can understand that I am in a highly unusual situation in which it is difficult to decide on the best course of action.

Work Experience

Skills

Education

Publications

• DLA: Compiler and FPGA Overlay for Neural Network Inference Acceleration 28th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), August 2018 (with 10 other co-authors) https://doi.org/10.1109/FPL.2018.00077
• Harnessing Numerical Flexibility for Deep Learning on FPGAs HEART 2018: Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Highly-Efficient Accelerators and Reconfigurable Technologies, June 2018 (with 10 other co-authors) https://doi.org/10.1145/3241793.3241794
• An OpenCL™ Deep Learning Accelerator on Arria 10 FPGA '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, February 2017 (with 4 other co-authors) https://doi.org/10.1145/3020078.3021738

Patents

• Floating-point decomposition circuitry with dynamic precision Patent pending, published 2020-07-09 (with 2 other co-inventors)
• Fast filtering US Patent 10083007, granted 2018-09-25 (with 3 other co-inventors)
• Methods and apparatus for rapid interrupt lookups US Patent 9811484, granted 2017-11-07 (with no other co-inventors)

Last Update: 2026-09-03

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