Jelmer van der Linde

Work experience

1. Dec 2023 – now Software Engineer at GenAI, Meta. I work on everything foundation models (Llama 3, 4), including reasoning, distillation, pre- & post-training data, and efficiency. I'm known for my debugging skills. (PyTorch, Spark, Python, C++)
2. Mar 2021 – Dec 2023 AI Research Engineer at Efficient Translation Ltd. Started as a spin-off from the University, we made state of the art translation technology available to consumers and businesses. With extra focus on efficiency and privacy. Acquired by Meta.
3. Mar 2021 – Dec 2023 Research Associate in the ILCC at the University of Edinburgh. As part of project Bergamot I'm developing desktop software such as translateLocally, browser plug-ins, and tooling to make machine translation accessible and efficient enough for everyday users. (C++, Qt, WebAssembly, JavaScript, WebExtension, Python)
4. Feb 2020 – Mar 2021 Research Software Engineer in the ILCC at the University of Edinburgh. I've worked on ParaCrawl, and other projects focussed on developing parallel corpora from public data. In practice I'm running, developing & optimising C++ software and tooling to process petabytes of data on multiple HPC clusters while dealing with noisy internet data. (C++, Shell scripting, HPC)
5. Sep 2018 – Feb 2020 Web & API developer at Global Surface Intelligence. My main responsibility was developing and maintaining GSI's geospatial web publishing platform & infrastructure (Mapbox, Vue, Flask, AWS, PostGIS). But GSI being a small SME, I was also contributing to the machine learning pipeline. I developed the LiDAR related components for counting trees and several data acquisition and raster processing tools. (PDAL, NumPy, rasterio, HPC)
6. Nov 2006 – Sep 2018 Freelance full-stack developer. As a freelancer I made websites and web applications, often for other freelancers and small businesses. These project range from implementing a well thought out design using WordPress to fully developing & deploying an application from just a concept. Other projects require me dig into code bases, something I have become quite adept in. (Mainly PHP, HTML, Javascript)
7. Oct 2015 – Aug 2018 Scientific and practical research and development at the Geodienst (Geo Services at University of Groningen). For the Geodienst I developed interactive maps, such as Fryslân uitgebeeld for very old maps (Geoserver, Javascript), and the Stemwegwijzer, which guides you to the nearest polling station during general elections (OSRM, Javascript, Golang). I also take part in research projects related to soil horizon interpolation (Javascript, PostgreSQL), hydrological models for the simulation of rainfall for large urban areas (Python, ArcPy, HPC), and tracing sites of habituation in the digital evaluation model of the Netherlands² (C++, computer vision).
8. Feb 2012 – Mar 2018 Teaching assistant at the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen. I taught & graded the practicals for the courses Knowledge and Agent Technology, Knowledge Technology Practical, Artificial Intelligence 2, Introduction to Logic and Object-oriented Programming. Most of these courses were taught using Java.
9. Jan 2015 – Apr 2015 Team leader for the Article Generation project at Crowdynews. I was a specialized intern on a project centred around Article Generation. The project focussed on selecting and summarizing informative text using natural language processing with the goal of automatically generating news articles. We organized this project with Crowdynews to help us finance an excursion to New Zealand. (Python, NLP)
10. Feb 2013 – Jan 2015 Research assistant at the Philosophy department at the University of Groningen. I developed a very playful application for tablets (for iOS and Android) to perform language experiments with young children.
11. Jul 2010 – Jul 2013 Research and teaching assistant for the Computational Linguistics group at the University of Groningen. I taught & graded the lab sessions of Logical Programming and Natural Language Processing 1. I also participated in the development of Dact¹, an open source desktop application for exploring large corpora using XPath & XQuery (C++, Qt). Teaching, grading and programming.
12. Jul 2007 – Sep 2007 Web developer at Concept7. I developed an inventory management system and moved an existing blog including its contents to WordPress.

Education

1. Sep 2012 – June 2018 Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Groningen. I completed electives in Computing Science focussing on computer graphics and visualisation, and in Linguistics focussing on natural language processing. My thesis is titled Human Argument Structure Language and concerns the computational understanding of argumentative text.
2. Sep 2008 – July 2012 Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Groningen. I chose my electives in Philosophy and Computing Science. For by bachelor's thesis I implemented and evaluated a neural network in OpenCL for running on graphics hardware.
3. Sep 2006 – June 2008 VWO Atheneum at Piter Jelles Adlân, graduated in 2008.
4. Sep 2001 – June 2006 VWO Gymnasium at Piter Jelles Stedelijk Gymnasium.

Other activities

1. 2018 – 2023 Volunteer at Prewired in Edinburgh. Every Wednesday, while I lived in Edinburgh I mentored young people in programming. Lots of Python, JavaScript, Scratch, LEGO Mindstorms, making games and microbits.
2. 2014 – 2018 Chair of Stichting Cover Travel Foundation.
3. 2012 – 2018 I participated in a number of committees at study association Cover. In February 2013 I organized a 10 day excursion to Stockholm & Uppsala, and in 2015 a three week excursion to New Zealand. I also manage the technical infrastructure of the association.
4. 2013 – 2015 Member of the education committee of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen.
5. 2014 – 2015 Member of TalentWeb Groningen.
6. Oct 2013 – Oct 2014 Secretary of the board of study association Cover., the study association for Artificial Intelligence and Computing Science. I automated most of the member administration, and during our board year the association transitioned to English as the main language.
7. 2009, 2011 – 2013 Volunteer at the Fronteers conference in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2013.

Technical skills

I use macOS, Linux and Windows daily. I am competent in writing modern safe code in modern Python, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, C++, Java, Go, Prolog, Haskell, XML, XPath and SQL, and I enjoy picking up new skills on the go. Still need to write something serious in a Lisp though…

Object oriented, functional and logical programming are honed skills of mine. I have experience with relational databases, especially with PostgreSQL (including PostGIS) and MySQL/MariaDB.

Experience in managing UNIX-like servers and building & deploying Docker containers.

Languages

• Dutch – native
• English – fluent
• Swedish – learning

Hobbies

I started early with making websites for myself and friends. Today that hobby has transformed to programming everything and anything, often with the goal of experimenting with new languages, techniques, and technologies. I have published a number of these projects on my Github and Bitbucket profiles.

I also like to read, mostly science fiction, preferably on the train or on the lawn of the university building. LEGO has always made me deeply happy. Halfway through my studies I decided I wanted to play an instrument and started studying the cello. One day, I'll hopefully be skilled enough to play Bach's first cello suite. I do find the fifth more interesting, but let's keep our goals realistic for now.