My first time winning FLL in Denmark
First LEGO® League
In 7th grade my physics teacher signed me and a small group of my classmates up for First LEGO® League and i was immediately hooked. For the next 3 years in a row, me and a rotating cast of my classmates won the national stage of the yearly global FLL competition. Winning a small trip to one of the other Nordic countries to compete in the next stage and making friendships for life.
These are some of my fondest memories of childhood. Every year for 3 years in a row, me and some of my close friends would get to leave school for a few days, take a trip and compete in on an international stage, and meet new people. We would have everything provided, stay in some schools gym hall and stay up all night eating candy and watching movies, we would sleep in sleeping bags, and we would spend all day troubleshooting a finicky robot, that would always introduce a novel problem when we needed it.
Highschool code club
My highschool didn’t have a codeing club, so i started one… Yes i am that nerdy. I ran codeing projects for everyone and learned enough in every language the other students used, to be able to help them when they had trouble. I learned a lot about running Organizations and clubs, and I would use a lot of what I learned when I continued the nerdy streak in college.
One of my own codeing projects was a simple platformer game, which i was very proud of at the time. I have converted the code to Javascript and the inputs to WASD, so go ahead and give the game a try.
National Group Chess Championship
Group Chess Champions
In high-school, called Gymnasium in danish, our chess-club held a little competition and 5 of us were nominated to go to the national group chess championships. Here through a comical set of circumstances, we ended up winning first place in our age group. This means, I, through almost no skill of my own, am now a former national (group) chess champion.
Super Computer Challenge
This was my first ever work with Big Data, a competition hosted by my university (SDU). The challenge was to create a program capable of taking the data of every danish citizen from 1787 til 1850, which has been hand transcribed, to try to track the movements of people.
The data come in large CSV files, which had been transcribed from immense stacks of handwritten national census poles from the 18th century . These poles were made by someone travelling door to door recording the name of every resident together with their relations and their reported age. The enormity of this data and the fact that it was all hand written means it is very prone to mistakes and misspellings. Names can be written in many different ways and since a large part of the population was illiterate no one knew how their names were to be spelled, this means that the same persons name can be spelled differently across the years of polling. This is worsened by the fact that many people misreport their age.
Our project took all of this into account and was able to track large swaths of people. The program took 3 days to run on the universities super computer after which we had a giant data set of movements of most of the nations citizens through the century.
TA - Teaching
I’ve helped teaching 5 classes at SDU as a Teachers assistant. Doing lessons, classwork and grading for everything from Computer Systems to Artificial Intelligence
International student helper
I’ve spent some time as a helper for international students, running introductory events, getting them familiarized with the university and as a point of contact in times of trouble
Tutor for new Master students
For new master students I tutored them for a semester across their curriculum, organizing and holding social gatherings as well as helping them get prepared for the more advanced classes and more demanding curriculums.
University Projects
A short list of some of the highlights of my university projects is as follows:
“home-made” flight tracking software (This was soon after the Crimea - Russia incident)
Flight Tracking:
I, and a few of my classmates made a flight tracking program for a flight planning company. The program we made worked with the official European Union Aviation Safety Agency to track real planes. We made a fully functional flight tracker, which served the basis for the companies later internal products.
Games:
During these years we made a unoriginal game from scratch (Mario with shotguns) and made several game related projects. Including competing in Generative Design in Minecraft competitions
Apps:
I’ve made three apps in my time, two for android and one for iOS. They span a wide range of topics, and are mostly made to use as many features as possible.
“Jeg har aldrig” Android app:
For my first venture into android development I made a simple but comprehensive “Never have I ever” app in Danish. The application was complete with ad’s, and in app purchases to unlock features, and a long list of features I was very proud of, for it being my first time working in the space.
Tracking Android phones with minimal permissions:
For a security project we developed an android application that can track a phone without the user being asked for any permissions using passive Bluetooth.
The application uses the phones Bluetooth chip to detect all nearby Bluetooth devices, which requires a permission, but not one that the user is ever made aware of. Essentially the phone gives permission without the user ever being involved. The Bluetooth devices detected are then used together with a online geo-map of devices triangulate the users position.
If the user ever gives the application access to the Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi can estimate location with high accurately) or even the GPS, the application the uses that data to update and improve the mapping of Bluetooth devices further, so that all users are more accurately located.
For some reason we decided to present our project with an animated video, so we spent 80+ hours learning how to, and then animating a full video presentation… that part still doesn’t make sense.
Home hearing tracking iOS application:
For iOS I developed a hearing checking app, working with a local hospital, and a PHD student. The application would calibrate the phones speakers to get pretty precise dB and frequency values, then use those more exact values to test a persons hearing. The application was meant for people who are at risk of loosing hearing, the specific project was working with patients undergoing chemo. The developed product would let the patient regularly test their hearing at home so they could warn their doctor in time if their hearing started degenerating
D&D association
At university all my friends kept begging to join my D&D game… still that nerdy…and I slowly came to find there were a lot of people who wanted to try the game, and almost none of them new what to do about it. I did what any rational person would do in my position, I started an official association at my university, wrote up a letter of conscription with a link to a Facebook page, printed the letter and hung it up on every notice board in sight.
Within a couple of weeks, I had 50 members and could feel that things had escalated, but we had a lot of games, and I feel I got to introduce a trove of new players to a hobby they might not have had the chance to try otherwise. I continued to run the association and some of the games for about a year, before my free time dried up and I had to leave it to others to continue
Projects at Universal Robots
As part of my work at UR i have been part of creating, some of which are not under NDA, the following is a selction of those projects:
Denmark Open
In 2023 I had the opportunity to work with the International Badminton Federation and Denmark Open to showcase Odense as a robotics city. For this we made the robots hand the players the shuttlecocks. This was not the most practical usecasse, but it did get great reactions from the audience, and the comentators on TV could not get enough of it.
On the right is a short video of the initial testing showing the general movement desired and below is a video of the comentators on live TV admirering the robot.
Tom Dixon
I worked with british artist Tom Dixon on creating an art instalation in Copenhagen for the 3DaysOfDesign event in the summer of 2023. Here we installed a robot that carved a lamp stand our of a solid piece of wood in front of an audience. The robot carved the iconic conical design of Tom Dixons lamps out of a single piece of Douglas Fir and ran day and night for 3 days.
The theme of the excibition was susteainability and local production, hence the combination of danish wood and a danish robotics company.
Motion control
Another place where the robots were implemented was for camera controls in variouse studios. I worked closely with a company selling these rigs, to develop their control system and improve their featureset.
The system is now used in the production of movies, live events and in the iconic slowmotion motion controlled shots of many advertisements.