About me

Education

I was born in Smilde, the Netherlands, on December 23, 1978. In 1997 I finished the Atheneum (high school) at the Vincent van Gogh College in Assen. The year after, I received my propedeuse in Computer Science from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. I then started to study Artificial Intelligence, by then known as Cognitve Science and Engineering. I received my M.Sc. degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Groningen in 2002. The title of my M.Sc. thesis was "Selection of Landmarks for Visual Landmark Navigation on a Mobile Robot" (pdf pdf).

Junior Teacher

Until 2005, I was appointed as a junior teacher at the same department I graduated from. I taught a number of theoretical and practical courses on Robotics and Autonomous Systems. Furthermore, I supervised a number of students with their Bachelor and Master projects. Finally, I organized a number of events. A full overview of my activities as junior teacher can be found here.

Ph.D. Student

I did my Ph.D at the University of Groningen from 2005 until 2009. The title of my thesis is "Visual Attention and Active Vision: From natural to artificial systems". On the one hand, the research deals with human visual attention and the prediction of eye fixations using symmetry. On the other hand, the developed saliency models are used to guide the attention of a robot that explores its environment. More about my research can be found here.

Post-Doctoral Researcher

Since October 2009, I work at the Computer Vision and Active Perception lab (CVAP) at the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH). To focus of my research is now on visual attention using top-down information for object segmentation and manipulation. More about my research can be found here.