Ólavur Mortensen

Software engineer

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Experience

2022 - present Kongsberg Discovery, Uncrewed Platforms Software Engineer

Formerly known as Marine Robotics, the Uncrewed Platforms division develops an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle affectionately known as Hugin. As part of the Navigation team in the Software Group, my job is to develop the Inertial Navigation System (INS) that enables Hugin to navigate autonomously underwater. Furthermore, we develop post processing and visualization tools to analyze and improve navigation performance post mission.

`2017 - 2022 FarGen, The Faroe Genome Project Bioinformatician / Senior Engineer

My main responsibility at FarGen (https://www.fargen.fo/) was to pre-process and analyze the large amounts of DNA sequencing data coming out of the laboratory.

I have had the privilege and great challenge to design the FarGen Cluster. From the start I tailored the cluster specifically for bioinformatics, from bare metal to user interface. The cluster is based on a powerful compute component managed by Kubernetes, and a efficient and reliable storage component based on Ceph.

In 2018, I applied for research funding from the Research Council Faroe Islands, and was awarded a PhD scholarship. In October of 2021 I decided to discontinue my PhD studies. During this time I took 26 ECTS worth of PhD courses. I also taught a PhD course in statistics in R, where I created the whole course from scratch (olavurmortensen.github.io/r-for-statistics). I practiced my duty to communicate science to both laymen and professionals, both abroad and at home.

In September 2021, I received the new title of Senior Engineer, which was deemed more fitting to my role at FarGen.

2015-2017 RaRe Technologies Intern

At RaRe Technologies, I was an open source developer for the Gensim project. In one of my projects, I developed a machine learning algorithm from scratch, wrote an efficient implementation, wrote tests through continuous integration, and wrote documentation for it. The tutorial I wrote (link below) was well received by the community. My master’s thesis on the subject (link below) received the highest grade attainable.

Tutorial: nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/rare-technologies/gensim/blob/develop/docs/notebooks/atmodel_tutorial.ipynb

Master’s thesis: www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/edoc/imm6971.pdf

2015 FractureCode Corporation Student assistant

Together with another student, I worked on a project exploring the possibilities in using big data technologies (specifically, Apache Spark) to analyze the huge amounts of data that FractureCode’s customers generate.

2012 Technical University of Denmark Teaching assistant

I assisted in the group work sessions in two terms of a course, teaching first year engineering students introductory programming in MatLab. I also graded reports in this course, which served as the students’ exams.

Other jobs

landfill worker, mailman, supermarket clerk