Stig Skelboe

Stig Skelboe has a M. Sc. degree in electrical engineering, a Ph. D. degree and a D. Sc. degree, both in scientific computing. He joined the Computer Science department at University of Copenhagen in 1982 as associate professor and became full professor in 1988. In 2009 he moved to the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.

- I have been involved in the ESS project since 2010, where I was in charge of setting up the DMSC in Copenhagen, through my position as professor at the Niels Bohr Institute. I worked on this for three years, and when BrightnESS commenced I began working with the development of algorithms and software for the detectors, which is part of Work Package 5.

In my daily work, I am especially occupied with working on the software for the detectors of the NMX instrument at ESS. I have hired two post docs to work on the algorithms for NMX, and the three of us constitute my small core team.

As the other people in this task are based at the DMSC, we frequently have status meetings, as we sit very close to each other. Sometimes we also go to Lund, to meet with the people in WP4.

What I like most about BrightnESS is that much of the work is interdisciplinary, from the large-scale engineering to the in-depth physics. The NMX detector alone combines the disciplines of electronics, physics and computer science, which means that we can pick tools from many different toolboxes and combine them in our work.           

To me, the main challenge of Task 5.1 is definitely connected to the neutron intensity, but another vital challenge is how the data is read. Currently, the data is read when a single neutron occurrence is registered but if we are not able to separate the occurrences from each other, this will be problematic. The whole ESS project is one joint chain, and if one of the links fails, everything is affected by it. The purpose of BrightnESS is to solve these concrete problems and challenges.