LUFOSS 2016 Awards
- 1 minI’m both happy and honored to announce that I have received the Lund University Fund for Open Source Software Undergraduate student scholarship for my open source contributions.
Erik Gärtner is a Computer Science student at Lund University and currently an exchange student at Georgia Tech in USA. He has contributed with several open source projects relating to graph theory and natural language processing. His two most popular projects is the graph visualization library dTree as well as a sentiment analysis library called Sentimental. He is also an eager bug fixer in many open source projects.
The purpose of the prize is to further open source work amongst students. Something that I strongly support.
Working on side projects is a great way to learn and explore new technologies while tackling problems that you find interesting. I cannot count how many times I’ve had an edge in class due to having worked with technology in my spare time.
Furthermore, by making the results open source you help others to learn and grow. Besides, chances are that you have used open source code along the way so giving back is only fair after all.
Hopefully, this scholarship will encourage more students to start taking an active role in the open source community.
For those living in the Öresund region and interested in open source I strongly recommend checking out Openhack 2016. It is a hackathon focusing on using open source code for humanitarian causes. When it launched 2015 we were a small project group with an ambitious goal. This year a new group has taken over and I’m convinced 2016 will be both bigger and better!
Erik Gärtner
Ph.D. in Computer Vision and Machine Learning