Curriculum vitae

Kaj Grønbæk

Personal Information

Born July 19, 1960.
Private Address:
N/A
Business address: 
Department of Computer Science
University of Aarhus
Åbogade 34
DK- 8200  Århus N

Phone: +45 8715 4112
Phone direct: +45 8715 6154
Mobile: +45 2149 5634
Fax: +45 8715 4113
E-mail: kgronbak@cs.au.dk
WWW: http://www.cs.au.dk/~kgronbak


Nationality: Danish.
Civil Status: Married to Iben Krarup Grønbæk (Master in Aesthetics and Communication); two sons Jens Emil Krarup Grønbæk (1990) and Asbjørn Krarup Grønbæk (1994).
Genealogy: Son of Oda and Johannes Grønbæk, Fjelstervang, Denmark


Education and Academic degrees


Primary school, 1967-76, Fjelstervang and Kibæk, Denmark. High School examination (Studentereksamen), Mathematics-Physics specialization, from Herning Gymnasium, Denmark,1979.
Cand. scient. (Master’s Degree) in Computer Science with Mathematics as the minor subject, Aarhus University, Denmark, 1988.
Ph.D. in Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark, 1991.


Positions held

1984-1988

Part time teaching assistant (Instructor) in several under graduate courses at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University.

1988-1990

Ph.D. student/Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University.

1990-1994

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University.

1994-1999

Associate Professor (tenured position), Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University.

1999-2004

Professor in distributed systems and their applications. Position funded by Danske Bank (The largest bank in Denmark). Leave from Assoc. Prof. position at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University.

2005-now

Professor at Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University.

2009-2018

Head of Interactive Spaces (part time) at the Alexandra Institute A/S

2018-now

Head of Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University

2018-now

Board member and Distinguished Scientific Advisor at the Alexandra Institute A/S

Research Interests


Human Computer Interaction; Interaction Design; Visual Analytics; Ubiquitous Computing; Interactive Spaces; Smart Products/IoT; Hypermedia/Web-technology; Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW); Participatory Design; Object Oriented Tools and Methods.


Teaching and supervision experience


Teaching assistant in courses on programming, machine architecture and system development during 1983 - 1987. Since 1988 teaching computer science and system development mainly at graduate level at Aarhus University. Supervisor for several Master’s Thesis and Ph.D. students.


In 1996, I was one of the founders of the interdisciplinary multimedia education programme at Aarhus University. Several years experience in teaching interdisciplinary multimedia courses in the programme as well as on similar programme at the IT-University Vest. Several years experience in running multimedia education in an Open University setting with participants distributed nation wide in Denmark.

I have several years experience in running a hypermedia class as distributed education on the first Danish IP-based audio/video connection which was established between the Danish Technical University and University of Aarhus in 1998 via the Danish Research Network.

In 2006, I was one of the founders of the IT-bachelor and ICT product development study programmes at the Department of Computer Science, AU. These study programmes features collaboration with Aarhus School of Architecture on industrial design disciplines. Since 2007, I have been teaching several of the main courses in this programme.


Have supervised more than 30 Masters Thesis projects and more than 20 PhD Thesis projects.


Project management and project participation

  • Work Package Manager for MADE Digital project WP2 (Innovation Foundation Denmark)
  • Work Package Manager for DABAI Big (Data Analytics Center) WP3 (Innovation Foundation Denmark)
  • Work Package Manager for Manufacturing Academy of Denmark (MADE) WP6 (Innovation Foundation Denmark)
  • Data analysis platform for the VPP4SGR Energinet.dk project
  • Project Manager of the Ecosense Project (2012-2016) funded by the Danish Strategic Research Counsil (Innovation Foundation Denmark).
  • Research manager for PosLogistics - A position based real time hospital resource planning system - optimized for logistical processes. (Danish Advanced Technology Foundation/Innovation Foundation Denmark)
  • Research Manager for Digital Sportsgrounds (Krogagerfonden)
  • Research Manager for "A platform for Galileo based pervasive positioning" (Danish Advanced Technology Foundation, Højteknologifonden)
  • Research Mobile Home Center - "Home is Where You Are" (Danish Advanced Technology Foundation, Højteknologifonden)
  • Research Manager for iSport - Interactive Sports Environments (ISIS2)
  • Research manager for IXP - Interactive Experiennce Environments (ICT-Corridor project)
  • Center Manager for Center for Interactive Spaces (www.interactivespaces.net) (2002 - Current). Established originally as part of ISIS Katrinebjerg (www.isis.alexandra.dk)
  • Research Manager of the CIT project #333, CONTEXTIT, in collaboration with Tele Danmark/InnovationLab and EUMAN A/S. 1 year (2003).
  • Manager of the National Research council project Distributed Multimedia Technologies and Applications (DMM) with a budget of Dkr. 22 mill over 4 years under the Danish Center for Multimedia.
  • Research Manager of the CIT project #123, COCONUT, in collaboration with Tele Danmark Internet. The total budget was Dkr. 10 mill. over 3 years (1997-1999).
  • Project manager/coordinator for the Open Hypermedia project under the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEF). Feb. 2000 – Jan 2001. The project was a joint development project undertaken by the Alexandra Institute ltd. and Mjølner Informatics ltd, the project delivered a version of Webvise tailored for use of Digital Libraries in research and education.
  • Manager of a NORFA research network for research education in Interactive Media (2000-2004) – total budget 1.500.000 NKR.
  • Manager of the InterMedia-Aarhus laboratory, part of the national Danish multimedia research initiative.
  • Manager of the Interactive Workspaces laboratory (http://www.cs.au.dk/ispace), part of the CIT Center for Pervasive Computing (http://www.pervasive.dk).
  • Co-manager of the EU IST, Disappearing Computer project, WorkSPACE 11,5 mill Dkr. (2001-2003).
  • Participation in other large projects (as workpackage/task manager): The research programme on Computer Support for Cooperative Design and Communication. Supported by an FTU grant from the Danish Natural Science Research Council and by the Danish Humanities Research Council. (1987-1989). The DEVISE project developing support for Experimental System Development, sup­port­ed by Danish Research Programme for Informatics, grant no. 5.26.18.19. (1990-1994). The EU Esprit projects: EuroCoOp (1990-1992); and EuroCODE (1992-1995).
  • Participation in AU Ideas Center for Community Driven Research (CODER), managed by Assistant Professor Jacob Sherson, Department of Physics.
  • Secretary and editor for a board formed by the Danish Ministry of Research in 1996 with the objective to investigate the prospects of establishing a Multimedia Research Centre in Denmark. The report is available at the Ministry’s server http://www.fsk.dk/.
  • Participation in organizing consortia for EU Proposals: EASTLINK: East European Contributions to Development of Object Oriented Hypermedia Application Frameworks. Plug-in Publishing: Open publishing services for integrated, local information repositories. OCTOPUS: On-line Commercial Technical Open PUblishing Service.

Grants and Research Management

 

Research Project

Period

Funding Source

 Grant (M DKK) 

Distributed Multimedia Technologies and Applications

1998-2001

DK Research Councils Case no. 9600869

 21,5    

COCONUT – Collaboration support and Component-based Webservices.

1997-1999

CIT project #123

 5,0    

Research Professorship in Distributed Systems - Personal Grant

1999-2004

Danske Bank

 4,0    

PhD network in Interactive Media

2000-2004

NORFA

 1,5    

WorkSPACE (with Preben Mogensen)

2000-2003

EU – FW5 IST-2000-25290

 11,5    

Laboratory for Interactive Workspaces

2001-2002

CIT- Center for Pervasive Computing (CfPC)

 1,3    

ContextIT

2003-2003

CIT- CfPC

 2,0    

PhD grant for Context-based Hypermedia project.

2003-2006

CIT- CfPC

 1,3    

Center for Interactive Spaces

2002-2006

Ministry of Science,  County of Aarhus, Municipality of Aarhus

 11,0    

IXP - Interactive Experience Environments

2006-2007

Ministry of Science

 3,0    

Mobile Home Center - "Home is Where You Are"

2007-2010

Danish Advanced Technology Foundation

 10,0    

A platform for Galileo based pervasive positioning

2008-2011

Danish Advanced Technology Foundation

 25,0    

iSport – Interactive Sports Environments

2007-2009

Ministry of Science,  County of Aarhus, Municipality of Aarhus

 3,0    

Digital Sportsground

2011-2014

Foundation of December 29th 1967

 2,1    

PosLogistics

2012-2015

Danish Advanced Technology Foundation

 15,0    

EcoSense

2012-2016

DSF – Strategic Growth Technology

 18,0    

Pilot Center for Community-driven Research: Game Assisted Quantum Computing

2012-2015

AU IDEAS

 0,1    

VPP4SGR

2013-2016

ForskEL-Energinet.dk

 1,0    

MADE (Manufacturing Academy of Denmark) WP6

2014-2018

DSF – SPIR program

 5,0 (AU Share)

DABAI (DAnish Center of Big Data Analytics Driven Innovation)

2014-2018

Innovation Foundation Denmark - Societal Partnership

 8,5 (AU Share)

MADE Digital (Manufacturing Academy of Denmark) WP1 and WP2

2016-2019

Innovation Foundation - Grand Solutions

 11,1 (AU Share)

Innovation and Commercial Deployment of Research.


Responsibility and management of a portfolio of commercial consultancy projects within the Alexandra Institute for 4-6 mio DKK annually (since 2009). These projects can be found under the Alexandra Institute (www.alexandra.dk) they include costumers like NCC Ltd, LEGO Company, B&O, Arla, KMD Ltd., Virklund Sport Ltd., Danfoss Universe Ltd., Municipality of Aarhus, etc. Below is an excerpt of example projects.

Consultancy Project

Partners/Customers

Commercialization of eBag and HyCon – Technologies for school learning.

KMD A/S

LEGO NXT Bluetooth Communication

LEGO Company

InfoGallery – Interactive information visualization Large screen interactive.

Libraries, Citizen Services, Museums, etc.

Wisdom Well – Interactive Floor in a Learning Environment.

Municipality of Århus, Møllevangskolen

Vivid technologi – Experience Design for Aquaria

Kattegatcenteret, NYX, Aqua

Visualization assessment and Support – Development of a quality assurance approach for architectural visualizations.

NCC

Future Education Facility (FUF) – development of interactive educational facilities.

Danfoss Universe, Nordborg, Denmark

Urban Computing – Infrastructures for Interactive city information systems.

Municipality of Århus

TagBlogging for Århus Festival – Mobile phone applications with Semacode support

The Århus Festival

AudioMoveTheater/AudioDramaBizz – location aware mobile audio theater.

Katapult and Innovation Lab, Århus

Interactive Communication of Art for the Mariko Mori exhibition at ARoS

ARoS Art Museum, Århus

EcoPhone – Learning App for Symbian Phones and iPhones about Organic Farming

Arla

Football Lab – Denmarks First Interactive Football training facility

Munin Sport, Herning Fremad

PIXLPark – Denmarks First Digital Playground

Musicon and the Roskilde Festival

Digital Threads – Augmented Reality Museums App for Smartphones

Herning Museum, Ministry of Culture

Editorial Boards, Committees, etc.

  • Editorial boards for: The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. London: Taylor & Francis.
  • Programme committee chair for ACM Hypertext 2011 - The 22nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. Eindhoven, NL, June 6-9.
  • General chair of ACM Hypertext '01 - the twelfth ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (http://www.ht01.org) Held in Aarhus, Denmark, August 14-18, 2001.
  • Programme committee co-chair for ACM Hypertext 1998 - The ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia.
  • The Journal of Collaborative Computing. Kluwer Academic Publishers. (until 2005)
  • Member of various programme and reviewing committees for: Several ACM CHI conferences; The Conference on Participatory Design (PDC); the Nordic Workshop on Programming Environment Research; the ACM Conferences on Hypertext; the European CSCW conference (ECSCW); the Third Decennial Aarhus Conference, Computers In Context: Joining Forces In Design (1995). WWW conferences. IADIS WWW/Internet Conferences.
  • Co-Chair of the Steering Committee for Interdisciplinary multimedia educations at University of Aarhus, (1997-2009).
  • Co-founder and chair of the steering committee for the IT Product Development Bachelor and Master’s Programmes at Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, (2007- Current).

Non-academic committees

  • Member of the Aarhus Region’s IT-Council’s ThinkTank on ”Interactive Rooms, Buildings and Urban Spaces” (2002).
  • Member of the Board for Hypergenic Ltd. (www.hypergenic.com) (2000 - 2006).
  • Member of the Board for AugmentedMedia Aps. (www.augmentedmedia.net) (2004-2005).
  • Member of the Aarhus Region’s IT-Council’s ThinkTank on ”ICT in Physical Products” (2006).
  • Chair of the board of Skovvangskolen (2001 - 2009).
  • ICT Expert Member of the Aarhus Municipality ThinkTank on “Spaces for Play and Learning” (Rum til Leg og Læring, 2008)
    (http://www.aarhus.dk/~/media/Dokumenter/MBU/RULL/Fremtidens-boernebyggeri.ashx)
  • Co-owner and Chair of the Board of Redia A/S (www.redia.dk) (2010-2015).


Awards

  • Winner of the Engelbart best paper award at Hypertext 97. The second Engelbart Award, in honour of the contributions made to the hypertext field by Doug Engelbart.
  • Awarded the "red dot: best of the best" for design concepts 2007 within the area of "education" for the Wisdom Well interactive floor for learning.
  • Best paper award in the Interactive Arts Track at the ACM Multimedia Conference 2008 for the paper entitled "Interactive Spatial Multimedia for Communication of Art in the Physical Museum Space" by Karen Johanne Kortbek and Kaj Grønbæk.


Talks and lectures


Many lectures about Cooperative Prototyping, CSCW, and Hypermedia both at national and international institutions. Including institutions such as: University of Aalborg, Denmark; University of Copenhagen, Denmark; University of Oslo, Norway; Xerox PARC, California, USA; Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Many talks about Prototyping, Active User Involvement, CSCW, Hypermedia, and Pervasive Computing in Danish companies and professional associations.
Invited talks for: The Open Hypermedia Systems Workshop at the ACM European Conference on Hypermedia Technology (ECHT '94) Edinburg, UK, September 18 -23, 1994. The Social Context of Hypermedia Workshop. Held in Umeå, Sweden, February 16 -17, 1995. The Open Hypermedia Systems Workshop at the HYPERTEXT '96 – Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext, Washington DC, USA, March 16-20, 1996. On Pervasive Computing for the SIGCHI.dk association at the IT-University, Copenhagen, March 2000.
Keynote entitled "Ubiquitous Hypermedia and Social Computing in Physical Environments" at Hypertext 2006 - Seventeenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia Odense, Denmark.
Many popular talks for public audiences as well as the Royal Family, ministers, and national politicians.

Professional memberships

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Special interest groups: SIGCHI - Special interest group on human-computer interaction. SIGWEB - Special interest group on hypertext and hypermedia. The Danish Academy of Technical Sciences (ATV). The Danish Association of Computer Scientists (Datalogforeningen).

Skills

Fully fluent in Danish and English; reads German and bits of Russian. Many years experience in object oriented programming and modern development environments. Experience in use of various user interface construction tools and application frameworks; various relational and object oriented database systems; various Web based tools at both client and server level.


Publications


Publications include 1 book (386 pages, MIT Press) and 100+ internationally peer-reviewed research publications. Citations: 6300+ and H-Index: 39, according to Google Scholar. For a complete documentation, see Publications to the left.