Fabricio Oliveira
Assistant Professor

“Jaan worked several times as a research assistant in summer positions in our group, developing applications related to optimisation. Being such a skilled software developer, he built professional-grade packages that could also be used by other members of the group collaboratively. He still is a member of our group and has made significant contributions in terms of our organisation, building our website and helping maintaining it, as well as our YouTube channel. Jaan is a brilliant young professional, perhaps one of the most talented I ever met, with a rare combination of strong technical and intellectual capabilities and social skills."

Experience

At Gamma-Opt, a research group that also a part of the System Analysis Laboratory, I worked at developing software packages for mathematical optimization models using the Julia language with JuMP modeling library. The models were based on earlier research produced by the other research group members. In addition to writing the source code, the development process included writing detailed documentation, unit tests, and configuring the packages. We used Git-based workflows, such as GitHub Actions, to automatically run unit tests and deploy documentation and GitHub Pages for hosting the documentation.

I also helped to set up the Gamma-Opt website and GitHub team and worked as a course assistant for the “Introduction to Optimization” teaching demo exercises over Zoom.

Anton von Schantz
Doctoral Student

“Jaan Tollander de Balsch worked as an assistant in my doctoral research. His task was to develop simulation software for modeling crowd movement and evacuation. I soon realized that he takes the initiative and is a hard worker, as he quickly created a working prototype of the software. His best qualities are that he is an enthusiastic guy to work with and has an uplifting character."

Experience

Crowd dynamics studies the movement of crowds of humans people. My work focused on developing software for simulating crowd dynamics based on existing research results. We implemented the simulation using the Python programming language and its numerical computing packages. I wrote an extensive article about implementing the simulation mechanics, which you can read on my website at How to Implement Continuous-Time Multi-Agent Crowd Simulation. All software code is available at the github/crowddynamics.