Christian Melchior, Senior Engineer, MongoDB
Christian is a Computer Scientist from Aarhus University. He is currently leading the Android Team at MongoDB/Realm, where he is realizing that developers are users too, and demanding ones to boot. He is an open source and remote work advocate and firmly believes that awesome products are not built on tech alone, but in the intersection between developers, designers and users.
“The best product usually only surfaces after many failures. ORBIT Lab is a great place precisely because it allows students to tinker, play, fail and finally succeed. I’m very honored to be on the Panel of Judges at the Orbies and I look forward to seeing a lot of cool projects and at the same time help them keep a strong focus on the value provided for end-users – because that is what ultimately matters.”
Kim Dyrholm Kristiansen, Senior Solution Architect, LEGO Group
Kim is a pragmatic tech-head working at LEGO as a cloud evangelist and Senior Solution Architect. Customer-first mindset and experience working in fields as eCommerce, B2B sales, marketing, asset distribution, social media, advanced analytics and more. Especially interested in how cloud technologies can enable a software development organization to produce great talents and incredible innovative technology products.
“I have a big place in my heart for startup-mentality, failing-fast (and succeeding fast), innovative ideas and seeing the drive in students pitching the new and surprising ideas/angles. Therefore I am honored to be judging this year’s round of The Orbies.”
Linda Lawton, Google Developer Expert / Senior Backend Developer, SKARP
Linda has a Computer Science degree from Newbury College, USA from 1994 and has been working as a software developer for over twenty-five years. She was the fifth woman worldwide to be given a Google Developer Expert title and the second person in Denmark. She currently holds two titles and is working towards her third.
Over the years, she has worked for the Hartford (USA), BilInfo, Target, EG and currently works for SKARP. Linda enjoys helping others learn to love programming and working with cutting-edge technology. She is also very active on Stack Overflow with a mind for helping others learn. She also contributes to a number of open-source projects Google .net client library, and Identity Server 4.
“The Orbies is an amazing event, giving students a chance to shine and show off their dreams and ambitions. It also gives us a chance to see the potential that will soon become part of our community. I am honored to be a part of this, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with.”
Otto Bjerg Hausgaard, Investment Manager, Vækstfonden (the Danish State’s Investment Fund)
Otto is an investor in early-stage companies with money from the Danish State (Vækstfonden). He has years of experience working inside companies that had investors on board and he has also been part of the company CAPNOVA for 6 years, investing from their part. Vækstfonden has a program for early-stage companies which is targeted companies that have no revenue, but only prototypes and hopes and dreams.
“Working with the bright people of startups is a privilege, it is something that drives my passion for the field. Great ideas come from all corners and working with student startup is no exception. I look forward to being part of the Panel of Judges at The Orbies.”
Tiare Feuchtner, Postdoctoral Researcher, Computer Science, Aarhus University
In her research, Tiare explores approaches for digital assistance through virtual and augmented reality at companies such as LEGO and Vestas, which are part of the Manufacturing Academy Denmark (MADE). As a computer scientist her main interest lies in human computer interaction (HCI) and she is fascinated by the opportunities and challenges for interactions in immersive virtual environments.
In pursuit of her PhD at Aarhus University she researched embodied user interfaces for virtual reality and augmented reality applications. Prior to her PhD she earned a master’s degree in computer science at the TU Berlin, and holds a bachelor’s degree in “Medieninformatik” from the TU Wien. During her studies, she was also a junior researcher at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) and was involved in the creation of the award-winning PC game “Schein” by Zeppelin Studio.
“The students of today will be the entrepreneurs, inventors and researchers of tomorrow. I think a culture that supports learning and friendly competition can foster their development, which is why we should encourage their creativity and honor their hard work. The Orbies is an excellent opportunity for this and I am looking forward to being blown away by a myriad of fresh ideas and inspired by the students’ ingenious solutions!”
Kresten Krab Thorup, Co-founder and CTO, Humio
Kresten provides technical leadership and vision at Humio, a local tech start-up with global customers and investors. In his previous role as CTO of Trifork, Kresten was responsible for technical strategy and has provided consulting advice to teams on a variety of technologies. Kresten has been a contributor to several open source projects, including GCC, GNU Objective-C, GNU Compiled Java, Emacs, and Apache Geronimo/Yoko. In his early days, Kresten worked at NeXT Software (now acquired by Apple), where he was responsible for the development of the Objective-C tool chain, the debugger, and the runtime system. Kresten has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Aarhus.
“I look forward to being part of The Orbies, to experiencing the wealth of creative application of technology and to supporting the initiative with my perspectives.”
Keynote
You can also look forward to an interesting keynote from Kresten on the potentials and technical challenges of real-time log analytics at massive scale and highly distributed systems and also reflect on his own personal journey through the tech industry – both as a part of startups and large companies.