1. Collin R.M. Stocks <collinstocks@gmail.com>
+1.862.245.1110
333 E 14TH ST APT 9M
NEW YORK, NY 10003-4212
EDUCATION
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art 2010–2014
• Bachelor of Engineering, Electrical Engineering, May 2014
• Cumulative G.P.A. 3.6 / 4.0, Major G.P.A. 3.7 / 4.0
• Dean’s List Fall 2010, Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013
• Full-tuition scholarship Fall 2010 through Spring 2014
WORK EXPERIENCE
SpinCar June 2014–present
Lead Engineer
SpinCar creates 360◦
interactive tours of vehicles (“360 WalkArounds”) to engage shoppers on car dealership websites. The
exterior is generated by extracting frames from a video taken by a dealership employee using SpinCar Capture for iOS or Android,
and the interior is generated from a panoramic photo taken with the Ricoh Theta or similar camera via the same app. Other data about
the vehicle is taken from a third party feed and processed to automatically tag hotspots on the vehicle.
• Demo: http://goo.gl/9eKFmh (http://demos.swipetospin.com/demos/automatic_demo_vbwa/)
• Worked with Linux, SQL, Flask, Python, JavaScript, and AWS in a professional setting.
• Developed a hotspot avoidance algorithm to maintain a reasonable distance between automatically tagged hotspots. The
algorithm tends to place hotspots in a rhombic pattern (as can be seen in the demo). This was an especially interesting problem
to solve for the spherical geometry of the interior panorama, although most of the math is essentially the same.
• Developed a REST API for serving 360 WalkAround metadata, used by the front-end to locate photos and display hotspots,
which serves 4 million requests per day. Also developed a REST API to enable SpinCar Capture to upload files to Amazon S3
prior to back-end processing, which serves many hundreds of requests per day.
• Developed a scheduling/queuing architecture for our batch jobs that has allowed SpinCar to generate several thousand 360
WalkArounds per day, process more than 4 million analytics calls per day, and import over 1,000 third-party feeds every six
hours using spot instances when available. It also handles rare high priority tasks, such as editing an existing 360 WalkAround.
• Currently developing a distributed queue to work around some limitations of SQS (the distributed queue used in the above
project). For example, it will allow peeking at and rescheduling jobs to prevent one aggressive user from starving others.
• Wrote all of SpinCar’s deployment scripts, including CloudFormation templates describing the resources used by each service
and rules for scaling them. This has allowed SpinCar to scale from 10 automotive customers when I started to over 1,000 today.
• Organized a team to complete large projects, such as migrating appropriate tables from SQL to NoSQL (as necessary) and
reworking analytics collection to better handle traffic spikes without dropping data.
Health Research Incorporated (Wadsworth Center, NYSDOH) Summer 2009, 2010, and 2011
Summer Intern
• Worked in a research facility alongside graduate and doctoral students, professors and professional researchers.
• Wrote a number of games for use with a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), then designed and carried out experiments and
performed data analysis to determine how effectively real users could play them.
PUBLICATIONS
• Stocks, Collin, and Gerald Lamb. “Delving Deeper: Calculating Pythagorean Triples.” Mathematics Teacher. 104.2 (2010):
152-5. Print.
Cited by: Fierro, Ricardo D. Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers. 1st ed. United States: Brooks/Cole, 2013.
Print.
PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS
• Course Work: Cloud Computing, Software Engineering and Large Systems Design, Communication Networks, Computer
Security, Computer Operating Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Data Structures and Algorithms, Computer Architecture, Lin-
ear Algebra, Digital Signal Processing, Circuit Analysis, Solid-State Electronics, Signal Processing and Systems Analysis,
Communication Theory
• Proficient with Python, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Some experience with C/C++, Java, MatLab and Bash, LATEX.

2. PAST RESEARCH/PROJECTS
• Hardware Random Number Generator
I worked with another student to develop a chaotic hardware random number generator to overcome certain issues with
modern random number generators. Our project went through several iterations, culminating in a working prototype and the
data analysis to prove its chaotic behavior.
• Othello Artificial Intelligence
I wrote an Othello-playing AI, using negamax search with αβ–pruning and iterative deepening. Five seconds per move
put it at approximately an intermediate level. My heuristic weighted corners heavily, and attempted to maximize the AI’s
number of legal moves relative to its opponent.
• Maximum Likelihood Detection of Overlapping Signals
Another student and I designed a maximum-likelihood estimator to detect the start and end times of a short signal interfer-
ing with another longer signal in the presence of noise. I recognized we were solving the maximum subsequence sum problem,
and as a result, ours was the only program that ran with linear complexity (the naive solution is cubic).
• Music-synchronized light show (without a microcontroller)
I worked with another student to design and build a music-synchronized light show from discrete digital and analog
components. We designed and built an analog-to-digital converter, a pulse-density modulation scheme that multiplied two
digital inputs, and a beat-detection filter.