I worked on the load balancer of the trade execution platform at CME Group. My team's role was to program and optimize the FPGAs behind the load balancer. Specifically, my primary goal was to identify the reasons for high tail latency during off-peak hours using time series analysis. The tools I used primarily included numPy, sciPy and matplotlib. The work entailed pulling packet data off the splunk logs and normalizing them on a regular basis. Then, my team worked to interpret these results and we reacted to the results by making changes to the FPGAs. The changes were still in test when my internship ended.
Long P. Pham
University of Chicago graduate. Zen Ranger.
Profile
I recently graduated from the University of Chicago. After graduation, I decided to travel throughout Asia for eight months before looking for career opportunities. My rationale for doing so is three-fold. First, growing up in a low-income immigrant family, I was never able to travel during my childhood and college years. I realized it would be difficult to do so after starting a career, so I saw post-graduation as an opportune time to do so. Second, I chose Asia because of my Asian-American identity. Many first generation Asians born in America don't get the opportunity their cultural heritage--the reasons why their home life is different from the typical Americans. This opportunity to see where my parents came from, how different it is to move to America after spending their entire lives in Vietnam, is one most Asian-Americans don't get. Since I was planning on traveling to begin with, I decided to seize this chance and experience where my family, along with 60% of the world population, comes from. Finally, I wanted to see how technology and economy were set up in foreign countries. What applications did they use for messaging? How was their public infrastructure set up? My myopic lifestyle until now led to great shock upon visiting countries that did not operate like the United States. While abroad, I also spent a considerable portion of my time studying algorithms as well as reading material related to applied statistics for economics and system reliabilty among other topics. Now I am looking for career opportunities in software engineering.
I am currently interested in machine learning, product reliabilty, and video games.
What I have done
My projects
CME Group
DMVR
For my mobile computing class, I worked with Nasr Maswood to create a virtual reality app in Unity. Currently, the primary use of virtual reality applications were for entertainment and gaming. We wanted to bring an educational aspect to the realm of virtual reality so we decided to make a driving school simulator (hence, DMVR).
Graduation!
I recently graduated from the University of Chicago with a degrees in both Economics and Computere Science. I'm looking forward to what the coming years have to offer and am excited to begin another journey!
Thesis
In order to graduate with honors in economics, I decided to write a bachelor's thesis! My primary goal was to learn more about the field of economic inequality and how data driven approaches can lead to strong results. Specifically, I studied consumption inequality in urban and rural households in the United States. Put simply, I found that urban households spend a larger percentage of their income on non-durable goods (food, entertainment) and that they experience a higher degree of risk in income (more likely to get promoted, but also more likely to get laid off). You can read more about it here
Rhynos
I made another game! For my class Game Construction, my friends and I created a 2D racing game. The core concept of the game is to be able to play as animals who have different abilities and speeds depending on their real-world attributes. This was an excellent opportunity to learn about both graph and physics library as well as a fun application of creating an AI using previous input data. Specifically, our implementation relied heavily on Box2D and Cocos2D with art from one of our team members!
BeeQuickr
I participated in Uncommon Hacks! Uncommon Hacks is a 24-hour hackathon at the Polsky Center at the University of Chicago with over 300 annual participants. Inspired from the popular Bee Movie meme where keywords make the playback speed increase, BeeQuickr is a web application that takes any webpage and a list of keywords, and recites the text, increasing in speed whenever a word from that list is used. You can try it out for yourself here .
lppham.github.io
I developed this website using a design from my colleague Mustafas Shikora. It is created using HTML, CSS, Javascript, Jquery, Bootstrap and PHP. As the domain states, it is hosted on GitHub. I hope to add more to the website in the future, including entries from my journal during my travels as well as educational CS related content. I believe one of the best ways to solidify one's own knowledge is to pass it on to others. I'd also like to acknowledge Patrick Dougherty for his expertise on fonts! His knowledge saved many hours of debugging.
Looking for opportunities.
After my journey throughout Asia, I am ready to pursue full-time opportunities in software engineering and data science.
Contact meResume
My education and experience.
Education
Economics, Honors and Computer Science
Networks, Machine Learning, Honors Theory of Algorithms, Discrete Mathematics, Linear Algebra, Statistical Models and Methods, Money and Banking, Data Visualization, Econometrics, Time Series, Databases, Mobile Computing, Functional Programming, Usable Security and Privacy, Game Construction
The University of Chicago
September 2013 - June 2017Experience
Computational Research Assistant
I assisted with research on how stimuli in the production network of an asset affects its value. To do so, I helped contribute to a Python library that selects the composition of portfolios based on the characteristics of firms in the production network of that asset. This primarily was done through using natural language processing tools to parse 10-K and other SEC to determine the effect of natural disasters (among other shocks) on the production of commodities.
Uchicago Dept. of Economics
October 2016 - June 2017Embedded Software Engineering Intern
At CME Group, I analyzed large market network traffic data from the CME Globex load balancer and used time series correlation methods (sciPy, numPy, matplotlib and pandas were useful packages) to help determine the causes behind high latency with the CME Globex trading platform as a whole. Along with my team, we then used the analysis to determine the best methods to reduce the latency in market order arrivals, therefore increasing the speed of the system. This was primarily done through modifying kernel configurations in our FPGAs.
Chicago Mercantile Exchange
June 2016 - September 2016System Administrator
During my first two years at CSIL, I primarily worked on automating our current systems and keeping the system images on our iMacs up to date. For example, I fully automated both the work schedule and cleaning schedule to automatically send shift reminders as well as match employees to shifts based on their weekly availability. In my last year, I concentrated on moving our administration tools from Radmind over to Ansible . Our rationale was that Ansible was much more lightweight, closely-maintained and suitable for the direction we wanted to take work in the lab.
Computer Science Instruction Laboratory
April 2015 - June 2017Teaching Assistant and Grader
As I stated earlier, I believe one of the best ways to solidify one's knowledge is through passing that knowledge on to others. Therefore, I decided to grade and TA during the latter two years of my undergraduate career. Criteria was mostly based on correctness, design, efficiency as well as code quality. Classes included CS121 (an introductory CS class for non-majors), CS151 (an introductory class for majors in Racket), Networks and Distributed Systems and Data Visualization.
UChicago Dept. of Computer Science
October 2015 - June 2017Honors and Awards
QuestBridge National College Match Scholarship Recipient
The QuestBridge National College Match Scholarship rewards low-income students primarily in the United States with a full tuition scholarship to one of the 40 partner colleges of their choice. This decision is based on leadership and academic standing and recipients must maintain a certain GPA to keep the scholarship.
CME Group Futures Trading Challenge Winner
All interns across all departments were invited to participate in a week-long futures day trading challenge using live market data from the CME Group trading platform. Each participant was armed with $100,000 on a dummy account and competed for the prize of $1,000.
Dean's List
The Dean's List at UChicago is an award given to students whose GPA are 3.25 or above for a given academic year. Fortunately, I was able to maintain this requirement during my entire undergraduate experience.
CME Code Up! Most Valuable Player
Code Up! was a company-wide hackathon in which interns would form teams and propose, implement and present ideas that would improve the value of CME Group as whole. My group created an internal platform to coordinate informal lightning talks promoting emerging technologies, low latency programming and internal services. The Most Valuable Player award is an employee-voted award given to one member among all teams.