I am principal software engineer at the drug and vaccine manufacturing startup Resilience.

Previous experience:

• As software engineer at the book-discovery service BookBub, I focused on the in-house advertising platform. I rewrote the matching tech to let authors/publishers target readers more flexibly, estimate and incorporate performance in the choice of ads more robustly, and generally improve the stability of the system and its revenue stream.
• I was lead software engineer in the data team at the advertising network Yieldbot. It was an exciting challenge to make the matching technology keep up with the tremendous growth the company was seeing: how to find ads that were relevant to the user based on the contents of page, how to choose between the ads and bid on adslots to maximize profits and meet other business constraints, and how to do all this at scale with low latency and high availability.
• I was previously a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, working with Anne Carpenter and her Imaging Platform. My work there turned measurements of billions of invidividual cancer cells into computational profiles ("fingerprints") that capture the biologically meaningful aspects of the cells’ appearance. Such profiles can be used to find similar genetic perturbations and/or drugs. I developed analysis methods that apply machine learning and data mining methods to large sets of complex, dirty, and poorly understood data.

My research interests are in distributed systems, databases, index structures, algoriths, and data science (see my publications), but I am an engineer at heart, motivated by building real systems that can manage the complexity and be robust to the curve balls thrown by large, real-world workloads. I thrive when I build and scale cool technology that makes a difference together with a competent and respectful team.

Education

• PhD in Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2002--2007
  Advisor: Prof. Ambuj K. Singh
  Dissertation title: Managing probabilistic data: toward data-driven biology
  Developed algorithms for managing uncertainty in biological data and to obtain, search, and mine probabilistic values.
• MS in Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, 1996–2002. Thesis work at University of California, Santa Barbara.
  Thesis title: Adaptive data replication and consistency
  Investigated adaptive data replication algorithms in large networks and studied how the efficiency of such algorithms is affected by the consistency condition imposed on the data.

Past teaching

• CS162 Programming Languages (Winter, 2007 at UCSB)

My name

I often get asked how to spell and pronounce my name. My name is spelled "Vebjørn Ljoså" in Norwegian, but I use "Vebjorn Ljosa" outside Norway. I pronounce my name [ˈʋêːˌbjǿɳ ˈljûːsˌóː]. Speakers of English can often come close with "vay-b-yearn lyo-soa". (But if it doesn’t come out quite right, it doesn’t bother me!)

---

Last updated: 2021-07-13