Edwin A. Suominen

I am a balding, ordinary-looking, older American male who has interesting ideas from time to time and who knows how to put them into words, computer code, and electronic designs.

Self-Portrait [Flickr page]

My sputtered musings about life, religion, and the beautiful absurdity of the universe wind up in books and on my shitty little blog. I’ve also dabbled a bit with fiction, resulting in a few short stories that have had a gratifying amount of exposure, thanks to some appearances on The Thinking Atheist podcast.

I’ve also done some photography and often find myself immersed in the magnificent obsessions of electrical engineering, both hardware and software. Open-source software development is a labor of love that has resulted in various packages for the Python programming language, including AsynQueue, ade, and yampex.

I’ve got a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington (1995). My senior project there wound up being the subject of fourteen U.S. patents with applications in many areas of Low-IF wireless technology, including Bluetooth®, FM, GSM, and Wi-Fi radio tuners.1 I also hold U.S. patents for technology relating to speech and handwriting recognition, cryptography, digital signatures, and audio signal reconstruction.

My last regular job was as a registered patent agent,2 representing patent applicants before the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Now, thanks to some success with my own inventions, I happily spend my days designing and building electronics, writing prose and software rather than patents, running a little indie publishing company, Tellectual Press, and sharing my observations about a world gone mad on Mastodon.

Notes


  1. See Washington Research Foundation’s Success Stories page: “As an undergraduate in the University of Washington’s Electrical Engineering Department during the mid-1990s, Ed Suominen invented a radio receiver technology with novel ways of tuning a radio among several channels. His work, with Professors John Sahr and Murat Azizoglu as advisors, resulted in a technology that eased the design and improved the performance of contemporary personal wireless data services such as mobile phones, personal computers and other devices. The invention has proven particularly well suited for use in Bluetooth-enabled wireless devices.” 

  2. Louis J. Hoffman, PC:
    http://valuablepatents.com/​firm-overview/​affiliated-patent-practitioners/