My interests

Last update: 30-07-2007

In this part of the website will be filled with information about my interests. Over time it should become a nice overview of my interests in the professional and personal fields.

• Artificial intelligence and knowledge systems
• Traveling and AEGEE
• Sports
• Computer Science

Artificial intelligence and knowledge systems

For the people who are wondering what Artificial Intelligence actually is (or wonder what my study is for) I warmly recommend this video from Google (the title of the video is "Google versus common sense").
This video shows what Artificial Intelligence is capable of, but even more what it is not yet capable of. Please note that Artificial Intelligence is a broad subject that covers multiple related Computer Science subjects. Here you can think of subjects like complicated search trees, image recognition, data mining, machine learning and much more.
Many people might have a bad feeling about Artificial Intelligence. These feelings are fed by movies like "The Terminator" and "The Matrix". When I look at this subject I do not see these doom-scenarios. I see that "intelligent" systems can help the human being to evolve further and further. I believe that Artificial Intelligence will give humanity a boost comparable with the invention of natural language.

Traveling and AEGEE

When browsing this page you might already have seen the name AEGEE several times. So let me introduce this organisation briefly.
AEGEE is the acronym of "Association des Etats Generaux des Etudiants de l'Europe" and you can find the website here. It is a nongovernmental organisation for students and young professionals. AEGEE works on two levels, the "local level" and the "European level". With the local level we mean activities in one of the antennea of AEGEE and with the European level we mean activities which include multiple antenea or one of the working groups. AEGEE has many fields of action, but for more information I recommend you to visit the AEGEE-Europe website
I am a member of AEGEE-Eindhoven (an AEGEE antennea located in Eindhoven). Via AEGEE I managed to travel quite a bit throughout Europe and I managed to get to know a lot of interesting and active young people. For a list of my activities in AEGEE you can visit my AEGEE-CV.
I also tend to travel outside of the scope of AEGEE. I usually travel with friends or too friends. Next to this I also travel for other reasons. For example to work as you can read in my CV. As you might guess, I am always open for job offers abroad.

Sports

Sports and I... we have a love-hate relationship. I love to do it, but do not have time for it. At least, not enough time. I used to be active in Judo. Due to the little structure I had in my life (due to the traveling and other business) I could not manage to train regularly. Then I switched to the flexible arts of "running around". I hope to get a bit more active in order to run the half-marathon in Eindhoven in 2007.

Computer Science

An other strong field of interest is in the field of Computer Sciences. This can be interpreted in a broad sense. I develop applications (professionally and as a hobby) and I "just work" with computers. As you can find here, I have my privat server running at home. This is a server build with special hardware (low-power and low-noise) and rund either Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu Linux.