Owen Kaser - Retired at Self-employed

Owen Kaser

Retired at Self-employed

Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Owen Kaser is a retired computer scientist and engineer with 13 years of active professional software experience built on a multi-decade academic and engineering career, including a long tenure as Associate Professor and Department Chair at the University of New Brunswick. He has deep expertise in low-level, performance-sensitive back-end development and data structures, evidenced by substantive contributions to widely used open-source projects such as RoaringBitmap (C/C++ and Java) and javaewah, where he improved core bitmap logic, fixed tricky bitwise bugs, and added robust unit tests including SIMD-aware code paths. His background spans hardware and embedded systems design from early modem work to advanced compressed bitset implementations, giving him a rare blend of systems-level intuition and rigorous research training (PhD, Stony Brook). Based in Saint John, New Brunswick, he now consults/works independently while staying engaged with open-source maintenance and correctness-focused contributions. An understated strength is his emphasis on testability and portability—his patches often enable both 32-bit and SIMD-enabled testing, reflecting a pragmatic focus on real-world deployability.

12 years of coding experience

6 years of employment as a software developer

BCSS, Hardware Systems, BCSS, Hardware Systems at Acadia University

PhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at Stony Brook University

Github Skills (19)

algorithm10

algorithms10

bitmap10

bitwise10

testing10

c1110

data-structure10

java10

bitset10

c1710

javas10

data-structures10

bitmask10

bit10

bitmaps10

Programming languages (5)

JavaC++ShellCAssembly

Github contributions (5)

RoaringBitmap/CRoaring

Jan 2016 - Jul 2016

Roaring bitmaps in C (and C++), with SIMD (AVX2, AVX-512 and NEON) optimizations: used by Apache Doris, ClickHouse, and StarRocks

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:56 commits, 1 PR, 31 pushes in 6 months

Contributions summary:Owen primarily contributed to the core logic of the C++ bitmap library. Their work involved refactoring existing code into macros for improved code reuse and efficiency, as well as addressing and fixing bugs within the codebase. Their contributions included implementing and debugging bitwise operations such as XOR, OR, AND, and ANDNOT. The user also worked on unit tests, enabling the testing with and without AVX enabled, while fixing associated code.

cppclangroaring-bitmapsbitmapsbitset-library

RoaringBitmap/RoaringBitmap

May 2015 - Apr 2016

A better compressed bitset in Java: used by Apache Spark, Netflix Atlas, Apache Pinot, Tablesaw, and many others

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:51 commits, 35 pushes, 2 branches in 11 months

Contributions summary:Owen primarily worked on improving the `RunContainer` class within the `roaringbitmap/roaringbitmap` repository. They focused on fixing and adding unit tests for the `andNot` function, which handles set difference operations. Their contributions involved modifying the logic and adding test cases to ensure correct behavior for different container types, indicating a focus on enhancing core data structure functionality. They also worked on implementing the `not` operation.

bigdataroaring-bitmapsspark-mlroaringbitmapdruid

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