Hi, I'm Ivan Arena, software engineer and published author.

At the moment I'm writing my thesis in MSc Computer Science and Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), focusing on AI and algorithms and while working as a software engineer at Dreamplan.

At Dreamplan I built from scratch a Python platform serving a REST API for data analysis and user segmentation, an internal RAG chat-bot and worked with financial calculations in C# and TypeScript, deploying my code to production and actively contributing to the company's vision.

At Qualcomm, I built tools to run and test transformer models on custom AI chips and contributed to Huggingface’s open-source diffusers library, gaining expertise on AI/ML.

At Athesys, I worked with state-of-the-art tools for SSI, implementing proprietary OpenID SSO in different Linux systems, diving into infrastructure and learning how real-world security is built from the ground up.

I started my journey in Padua, where a BSc in Computer Science laid my foundation in algorithms, C++ and data structures. With a 3.95 GPA, I wasn’t just learning — I was thriving. After that I interned at Athesys, then Qualcomm in Ireland, and lastly joined Dreamplan and enrolled at DTU in Copenhagen. After an exciting year at DTU, I moved to Barcelona thanks to Erasmus+ to attend SWE and AI classes at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya to experience yet another culture and way of learning.

In my free time I also sometimes work on software projects, you can find most of them on my GitHub, I will list here a couple:

UnCAPTCHAble is a custom CAPTCHA API that beats AI — literally. Designed and built completely by me with Node.js, React, MongoDB, and PyTorch, it fooled even advanced classifiers and detectors.

NowOnScreen is an app that I developed while in Barcelona leveraging webscraping and LLMs for information extraction and entity recognition in order to have a weekly summary of all the cinema screenings in Barcelona.

For any inquiries you can reach out to me on my LinkedIn or send me an email at ivan.x28x@gmail.com.