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

Between 2019 and 2021, I worked summer and part-time jobs at Gamma-Opt, a research group that is also part of the System Analysis Laboratory at Aalto University. In the group, I developed software packages for mathematical optimization models using the Julia language with JuMP modeling library. The models were based on earlier the group’s earlier research. The development 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 added links to relevant projects below.

Additionally, I helped to set up the Gamma-Opt website and GitHub team and worked as a course assistant for the Introduction to Optimization course, teaching demo exercises over video at 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

During the summers of 2017 and 2018, I worked in a research group focused on Crowd Dynamics at the Systems Analysis Laboratory in Aalto University. Crowd dynamics refers to the movement of human crowds. My work focused on developing software for simulating crowd dynamics based on existing research results. I implemented the simulation using the Python programming language and its numerical computing packages and 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, particularly the simulation engine and graphical user interface.

Bachelor’s thesis was my first touch on independent research and numerical analysis. Numerical analysis is a computational approach to exploring the properties of mathematical structures such as functions. I wrote an article based on the thesis at Exploring the Pointwise Convergence of Legendre Series for Piecewise Analytic Functions.

Albeit the scary-sounding title, the idea behind the work was simple. Derive a recursive formula with Legendre polynomials (continuous functions) to approximate non-continuous functions and use the formula to compute large degree polynomial approximations to study the convergence of the approximation error. Finally, compare the results to theoretical predictions.

The thesis work taught me valuable lessons about numerical versus analytical mathematics and made me more confident in my ability to work independently. I also became more interested in the computational approach to science.