Axel Jacobsen
Experience
Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub
R&D Engineer | Mar 2022 - Present
We are creating a low-cost imaging cytometer for malaria diagnosis, which images fresh blood and finds malaria parasites with my object detection model (YOGO, manuscript in-progress)- Designed and developed YOGO, an object detection model with a limit of detection of 0.00038% parasitemia. Reached 1680 FPS on an A100 GPU for (772, 1032) px images
- Created a convolutional neural network to predict distance and direction from focal center for the cytometer's autofocus. Successfully deployed to collect over 10 TB of data from Uganda
- Organized, pre-processed, and analyzed the 10 TB of clinical data. This included writing many tools (Python + Bash) to manage and analyze the data which our team uses daily
- Worked on software optimization for the microscope, focused on performance. Key contributions included creating a multiprocessing manager to efficiently move data between processes for heavy calculations, reducing mean execution times from 16.3 ms to 4.8 ms
R&D Engineering Intern | Jun 2020 - Dec 2020, Jul 2021 - Dec 2021
- Rewrote the entire codebase for the Opentrons OT2 (an open-source liquid handling robot) in 6 months to allow more complex protocols and to simplify the software
- Wrote an ADC driver for a luminometer to detect COVID-19 antigens, currently deployed in Bangladesh. Link to research
Wildlife Computers
Engineering Intern | May 2019 – Aug 2019
- Designed a PCB to protect digital lines from interference
- Wrote embedded C++ for automatic PCB component verification
Control Mobile
Data Science Co-op | Jan 2018 – Apr 2018
- Improved 300+ SQL queries, achieving a mean 65% reduction in data retrieval time
- Worked on bug fixes, code development, and refactoring
Other
Engineering Physics Autonomous Robot Competition
- Engineered an autonomous robotover 8 weeks, capable of navigating an obstacle course and collecting objects
- Wrote control software for subsystems and Goertzel filter for frequency detection
Small Fun Projects
- Huffman compressor in C
- trading botand a backtest serverfor Manifold Marketsin Rust
- FIXME-roulette in Rust
Education
University of British Columbia
B.ASc Engineering Physics | Graduated Dec 2021
Denmark Technical University
Exchange Semester | Winter 2019
- Won the DTU OS Course Competition with the creation of the fastest reverse hash server
- Developed an LSTM-based Deep Q-Network for my machine learning course