PeopleofSuperintelligence

Builder

Jeroen Ooms

Also known as Jeroen C. L. Ooms

Jeroen Ooms is an infrastructure engineer for the R language whose rOpenSci packages include tesseract for OCR, opencv for computer vision and cld3 for language detection. Trained in psychology and statistics at Utrecht University, he spent 2009 to 2010 as a visiting scholar at UCLA's Statistics Department and began its statistics PhD program in 2010. In 2014 he posted arXiv papers on the jsonlite package and the OpenCPU system, and in 2016 he published the tesseract OCR package for rOpenSci. R-universe, the package platform he leads, became an R Consortium Top-Level Project in 2024, and he joined the Consortium's Infrastructure Steering Committee. He is Lead Infrastructure Engineer at rOpenSci and a member of the tidyverse team.

Now at
NumFOCUS

Timeline

  1. 2007–2010

    From Utrecht to UCLA

    He earns a B.S. in Psychology at Utrecht University in 2007 and a cum laude master's in Statistics and Methodology there in 2009. From 2009 to 2010 he is a visiting scholar at the UCLA Statistics Department, studying under Jan de Leeuw, and in September 2010 he begins the UCLA statistics PhD program.

  2. 2014

    The jsonlite and OpenCPU papers

    In March 2014, he posts an arXiv paper on the jsonlite R package that describes a mapping between R classes and JSON data. In June 2014, he posts The OpenCPU System, which presents software built on HTTP and R that exposes an interface for scientific computing.

  3. 2016

    The tesseract OCR package

    In November 2016, he introduces tesseract, an rOpenSci package that brings an open-source OCR engine to R. Researchers can use it to extract text from images such as photos and scanned documents.

  4. 2021

    Building the R-universe system

    In March 2021, he describes the build infrastructure of R-universe, a new umbrella project by rOpenSci for improving publication and discovery of research software in R.

  5. 2023

    WebAssembly builds and a grant

    In November 2023, R-universe starts building WebAssembly binaries of all R packages for use in WebR applications, and he describes the change on the rOpenSci blog. The R Consortium also funds a $40,000 grant in 2023 that he proposes with rOpenSci to take R-universe to the next level.

  6. 2024

    An R Consortium Top-Level Project

    In December 2024, the R Consortium names R-Universe its newest Top-Level Project and commits to three more years of support. He, as R-Universe's lead developer, joins the Consortium's Infrastructure Steering Committee.

  7. March 2025

    jsonlite 2.0.0 on CRAN

    jsonlite 2.0.0 is published on CRAN in March 2025, with him as author and maintainer. The package parses and generates JSON for R and includes functions to stream, validate and prettify JSON data.

  8. As of October 2026

    Lead Infrastructure Engineer at rOpenSci

    He is Lead Infrastructure Engineer at rOpenSci, project lead for R-universe and a member of the tidyverse team. His rOpenSci packages include tesseract for OCR, opencv for computer vision and cld3 for language detection.

Career

  1. NowNumFOCUSLead Infrastructure Engineer
  2. From 2024R ConsortiumInfrastructure Steering Committee Member
  3. 2009–2010University of California, Los AngelesVisiting Scholar

Education

  1. From 2010University of California, Los AngelesPhD
  2. 2009Utrecht UniversityMaster's in Statistics and Methodology
  3. 2007Utrecht UniversityB.S. in Psychology

From the biography.

Videos

YouTube videos in which Jeroen Ooms speaks or appears, newest first. A model chose them from YouTube search results. List updated 22 October 2026.

  1. R-universe Q&A (Jeroen Ooms and Maëlle Salmon)LatinR · 3 December 2025 · 10 min
  2. Keynote: The R universe ProjectR Consortium · 8 August 2021 · 59 min
  3. Jeroen Ooms | Monitoring health and impact of open-source projects | RStudioPosit PBC · 18 February 2021 · 20 min
  4. Jeroen Ooms | A preview of Rtools 4.0 | RStudio (2019)Posit PBC · 9 November 2019 · 21 min

All 9 videos of Jeroen Ooms

Video data from YouTube API Services. By watching you agree to the YouTube Terms of Service. How we use YouTube data.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes University of California, Los Angeles. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of California, Los Angeles. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. Universities keep AI researchers for a median of 6 years, compared with 2 years at frontier labsIncludes University of California, Los Angeles. Across 15,811 dated work stays (6,529 people), median role tenure runs from 6 years at universities to 2 years at frontier labs. We compare all five organization types, starting decades from the 1970s to the 2020s, and the organizations that keep people longest.
  4. People shaping AI work at a median of 3 organizations over a career: 3 for university starters and institute and lab starters, versus 2 for company startersIncludes University of California, Los Angeles. Across 6,853 people shaping AI with a dated work role, we estimate a median of 3 parent organizations over a career (mean 3.6), comparing role groups, starting sectors and starting decades from the 1950s to 2020–2026.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. The R-Files: Jeroen Ooms r-bloggers.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. The jsonlite Package: A Practical and Consistent Mapping Between JSON Data and R Objects arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. The OpenCPU System: Towards a Universal Interface for Scientific Computing through Separation of Concerns arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. The new Tesseract package: High Quality OCR in R ropensci.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. A first look at the R-universe build infrastructure ropensci.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. R-universe now builds WASM binaries for all R packages ropensci.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Funded ISC Grants (2023-2) r-consortium.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. R-Universe Named an R Consortium Top-Level Project ropensci.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. jsonlite: A Simple and Robust JSON Parser and Generator for R cran.r-project.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. rOpenSci | Content by Jeroen Ooms ropensci.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. jeroen (Jeroen Ooms) · GitHub github.com. Checked 21 October 2026.