Curriculum vitae

Résumé (December 2012)

Certification

Bio

I have always been fascinated by both computers and by human behavior and psychology. Creating websites was one of my favorite pasttimes in high school. After a long search in the final year of high school I found a university with a major that fits this profile to the letter. I have now graduated from the study of Artificial Intelligence: Cognition Sciences with honors (cum laude) at the Radboud University Nijmegen and am proud to be able to call myself a Master of Science. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a very broad field and we got to learn about extremely interesting topics like brain-computer interfacing, robotics, cognition, human-machine interaction, search and planning techniques, intelligent agents, language understanding, knowledge systems and machine learning. All the while stimulating our brains with advanced mathematics and logic, and learning to create something from nothing through programming and web development. However, the field's breadth is both a blessing and a curse, as the active pursuit of true general intelligence (strong AI) seems rare these days.

Shortly after the start of my university education it became apparent that I had a knack for programming, and I was asked to become a teaching assistent at one of the introductory courses. Soon a second and a third programming course followed. The experience of guiding other students, grading assignments, creating material and teaching classes taught me at least as much as the courses I took as a student. It was the same kind of gratification that I got from teaching Taekwon-Do.

In my fourth year I was offered a part-time job at RE-phrase. For one day every week I got to experience working in a small company and developing interesting communication aiding software. Unfortunately I had to stop working there when the time came to finish my bachelor thesis on using meaningful representations in neural networks to prevent catastrophic interference and start my master internship. For over a year I worked at Philips Research as a Student Researcher. It was very interesting to see the workings of a department in a large multinational and there was just so much cool research that could be done there. My main research topic eventually ended up being about the effects of stimulation properties in SSVEP-based brain-computer interfaces. These systems work by deducing from a user's brain activity which stimuli he is attending to. Properties of those stimuli such as color and size affect the system's performance and user comfort in previously undocumented ways. My main goal was to investigate these exact effects.

After graduation I came to work for VicarVision: a small computer vision company in Amsterdam. Here I'm working on interesting, challenging and diverse computer vision problems. I have worked on detailed close-range behavior analysis, classification of facial expressions and characteristics and people detection for video survaillance. I'm currently collaborating on an international project where the aim is to prevent the adverse effects of human errors by automatically estimating the risk that they are making mistakes based. We do this by observing the user's actions and estimating their mental state based on gaze, facial expressions and body pose. I'm primarily working on the project infrastructure and pose estimation.