It is with great sorrow, we received the message that Associate Professor Niels Olof Bouvin has passed away on Friday 28^th of March 2025, at the age of just 54.

Niels Olof was very open about the fact that he suffered from the inherited disorder Marfan Syndrome that affect the body tissue which is vital to organs like eyes and the heart. He had been told since he was a child that there were so many things he couldn't do because of his disorder, and that he would die young. But he fought to overcome his low life extpectancy and he chose his own way of life. He celebrated his every birthday as a new victory, that was posted on Facebook as 'I am Still Not Dead.' On February 19 this year, he unfortunately made this posts for the last time.

Two weeks ago, Niels Olof was conducting exams and giving lectures as he loved to do. But a week ago he got a serious infection in his artificial cardiac valve. The only prospect was a complicated many hour-long open-heart surgery. Unfortunately, Niels Olof passed away after the surgery. His passing is a great loss to the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, as well as to us personally as colleagues who have benefitted from his unique humor and social engagement.

Niels Olof received both his master’s degree (1996) supervised by Susanne Bødker, and his PhD degree (2001) supervised by me, from Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University. He is known for his contribution to open hypermedia services for the World Wide Web allowing users to annotate and link freely to and from arbitrary Webpages. This was the main topic of his PhD which he continued working on in his Assistant Professorship starting in 2000. This work made him a co-winner of the Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award at ACM Hypertext in 1997 and 2006. He became Associate Professor in in 2004, and his research interest turned towards software for smaller devices (known as IoT and Edge today) and in 2006 he received a grant to do research on peer-to-peer computing with small devices from Independent Research Fund Denmark. Here he came up with the ideas for so-called cyber-foraging, where smaller devices dynamically can forage computing power from more powerful devices being seen in close by peer-to-peer connections. This research led to his interest in developing software for ubiquitous computing, interactive spaces and later computational thinking devices for learning in primary and secondary school.

A Devoted Teacher, Researcher, and Friend

Niels Olof’s main passion was teaching, he was teaching the Computer Architecture course and the Pervasive Computing course for IT Product Development for many years. He liked to experiment as part of his teaching. For instance, he was the first teacher at the department who long before Covid-19, consistently recorded his lectures and made them available for students online. Niels Olof was also a first mover in developing teaching methods that use GenAI as a legitimate tool for coding.

Niels Olof has received the teacher of the year award in 2015 at the Department of Computer Science, and he received the Faculty of Science and Technology Education Award in 2016.  In recent years, he focussed teaching on software for small devices at bachelor’s level “The Web of Things” and master’s level “Building the Internet of Things with P2P and Cloud Computing”. These courses have been extremely popular among our students. Niels Olof often had long lines of students waiting outside his office to get project supervision as part of his courses.

This popularity led to Niels Olof becoming the supervisor for impressive 125 MSc, 50 BSc, 3 PhDs since 2003. In fact, Niels Olof has supervised 5% of the 2.440 master’s students from our department from 1970 to date of his passing. This is a truly impressive and memorable contribution to our department’s educational performance. Niels Olof also served on our Educational Committee for many years, where he among other things were responsible for every semester allocation and hiring of TAs for all courses.

A Colorful Presence in Every Way

On a personal note, being his PhD supervisor, I have always enjoyed his very colorful personality. Everyday a new T-shirt with a fun message, a Japanese anime character, or even a pony from My Little Pony that he was a great fan of. For parties he often showed up in completely white or black suit and tie. He always had a fun typically ironic comment on ongoing debates being technological or political. If I got him started on discussing literature, movies or underground music, he was able to bring in an impressive back catalogue of references that were completely unknown to me. Of the more known refences he told me that he had read the entire Tolkien “Lord of the Rings” works several times. He also often quoted long statements from literature or movies as part of a discussion. His passion for literature is well illustrated in his email signature that carried a quotation by Thomas á Kempis in Latin:

“In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.”

(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)

Speaking of colorfulness, his office was also a chapter of its own. There are loads of comic posters, computers, pony figures, Hi-Fi equipment and small computing devices on walls, on shelves, in drawers. For a “tour de office” event several years ago, he made his door into a rainbow with post-it stickers, this decoration has lasted for many years now. The picture below showing a half open door with Niels Olof sitting at his desk, is what colleagues would see early morning to late afternoon, and he was always open for a chat. We will all miss this view and the chat opportunity it represented!