Hey, I'm Sean

A math student interested in scientific computing scientific computing backend development computer graphics deep learning data visualization simulation .

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Experience

Research Assistant

Environment and Climate Change Canada | Toronto | Jan 2025 - Apr 2025

Evaluated and fully implemented parametric tropical cyclone wind and pressure models to improve their representation in CONCEPTS. Also developed new techniques to locate centers of tropical cyclones from satellite imagery. This work resulted in a paper!

Fortran, MATLAB, Python, Git

Research Assistant

Environment and Climate Change Canada | Toronto | May 2024 - Aug 2024

Compared multiple parametric tropical cyclone wind and pressure models against real-world data.

Python, MATLAB, Git

Backend Software Engineer

Atolio | Remote | May 2022 - Aug 2022

Implemented user management API and evaluated internal search engine performance.

Go, Java, Amazon EC2, Docker, Git

Education

Bachelor of Mathematics (BMath)

University of Waterloo | Sep 2021 - Present

Math Studies major | Pure math minor | Computational math minor

Projects

mango (work in progress)

I find it extremely satisfying that computers can generate life-like images. As such, I'm self-studying physically based rendering. The project is still in its early stages. Currently, working to improve sampling (want stratified, importance, and adaptive sampling) to improve efficiency and noise reduction. Here are some renders:

Cook-Torrance microfacet material with increasing roughness
Gold statue with sky environment

Go

neural (work in progress)

After taking a neural networks course at school, I wanted to implement a feedforward neural network from scratch myself. I'd like to expand the project in the future.

Go

Impromptu

The goal of this project was to learn 3D graphics from the ground up.

Here are some screenshots:

Wireframe
Model colours as normals
C

tempo

Started as an animation library in Go, but I decided to try and turn it into a web app.

Sample animation

Go, JavaScript, HTML, CSS

polygo

A polynomial library because I find it satisfying when computers do math.

Graph with annotated intersections and intercepts
Go

Hobbies

Blender

In the spirit of building, I like to (rather poorly) model and render 3D scenes in Blender.

Here are some of my creations:

Earth (with scientifically incorrect atmosphere)
Water simulation
Low-poly mountain with dense forest
Four-legged table with glass top

Badminton

I'm a big fan of badminton! Here I am performing a smash:

Stack Exchange

I love to ask and answer questions! Over the years, I found myself visiting the Stack Exchange network of websites quite often for questions ranging from math to French. I'm no Stack Exchange guru, but I think it's cool to look back at the types of questions and answers I was giving (and maybe laugh at them).

profile for Scene on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites Link to my profile

Contact

Personal: seanjrnxie@gmail.com
School: sean.xie@uwaterloo.ca