Giovanni Zavalza Email & Phone Number

West Chicago, IL, US

Urbana-Champaign Area

• Designing the code infrastructure with SHPETech team for the VEX High Stakes Competition 2024
• Assisting the TransferSHPE branch within UIUC to recruit incoming transfer students and expand their opportunities
• Fundraised over $400 for SHPE UIUC’s Annual New Member Fiesta by selling Mexican food vendor snacks

Rolling Meadows, Illinois, United States

• Simulated serial and ethernet communication to integrate embedded software on targeted hardware following an ICD document
• Created a heartbeat thread to communicate status updates with hardware using Boost and binary protocols
• Made a GUI application in Qt Creator and a T&C shell to test and debug hardware

Rolling Meadows, Illinois, United States

• Consolidated logs by creating a Python GUI app that starts, logs, and kills multiple processes through threading
• Customized configurations for the GUI allow for terminal commands to be ran as subprocesses, allowing Docker Containers and VMs to also have programs be logged
• Installed and applied Google's C++ Testing Framework to unit software for debugging

Rolling Meadows, Illinois, United States

• Sped up aerial navigation tests by designing a 3D flight visualizer made with OpenGL ES2 on Linux
• Read proprietary image bitmaps for sensor testing by expanding a Qt Creator template with a custom plug-in
• Simulated serial and shared memory communication to test, debug, and integrate embedded software following an ICD document on targeted hardware

College Of Dupage

• Outreached to 3000+ attendees at the College of DuPage’s STEMCON event with a DIY Website workshop
• Oversaw 3 teams with 40 programmers total through GitHub and meetings to maintain flow of development
• Recruited ~300 members to join the club’s discord server and maintained 50 active members
• Initiated the IoT Smart Mirror project by organizing the hardware, structural, and software engineers

College Of Dupage

• Achieved 1st ever NASA/Caterpillar Autonomy HM Award using path planning, object detection, and motor scripts
• Designed the software architecture for AI and motor locomotive with C++, Python, ROS, OpenCV, and Linux VMs
• Spearheaded the robotics project with 10 software developers by integrating GitHub and Jira/Agile methodologies
• Collaborated with 40+ mechanical, systems, and electrical engineers to build a lunar bot integrated with Intel RealSense depth cameras, LiDARs, IMUs, and Falcon motors for the national NASA Lunabotics competition
• Sensor Fused IMU with visual odometry through ROS nodes, messages, and publishers to allow localized robot to collect positional data on local and global maps

Elmhurst, Illinois, United States

Funded by the National Science Foundation, I worked on a VR application that will promote STEM learning and liberation to create at any level. This will allow anyone with any background of skills to learn and create within a VR space. With the help of Dr. Vanderhyde, I created a gallery where users can spawn objects and made it so every object is.

College Of Dupage

• Initiated network configurations and controls interlinking to allow the robot's raspberry Pi to receive user inputs from an Xbox controller and output motor commands
• Developed an object detection algorithm to recognize landmarks for localization and obstacles for path traversal
• Collaborated with mechanical, systems, and electrical engineering teams with 40+ members total to assemble a robot that can perform autonomous operations for NASA’s and Caterpillar’s 2023 Lunabotics Competitions

West Chicago, Illinois, United States

• Diagnosed and repaired Google Chromebooks for students and staff of District 94
• Leveraged technical and troubleshooting skills to fix computers at lowest possible price for customers
• Led group projects involving repair of student Chromebooks

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Computer Science

Activities and Societies: Engineering Pathways Scholar, James Scholar, SHPE# 5 Ranked Computer Science Undergraduate Program by US News.

Associate'S Degree, Computer Science

Activities and Societies: Engineering and Technology Club, Physics Club, Computer Science Club

High School Diploma

Activities and Societies: Track captain, Math Team member, Football captain, Student Ambassador, High Honor Roll