I graduated in computer science at the Limburgs Universitair Centrum (LUC) in Diepenbeek, Belgium in 2003. After a short stay at Androme NV, I joined the Networked Virtual Environments (NVE) research group of the Expertisecentrum voor Digitale Media (EDM) in 2004. The EDM is the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) research centre of the LUC.

My main research interest is computer networking. Topics I find particulary interesting in this research area include

• network architectures
• multiplayer games and online communities
• scalability (supporting large numbers of simultaneous users)
• network intelligence (incorporating intelligent nodes in the network that are capable of performing valuable services)

Closely related to this last topic (network intelligence), I am also doing research concerning services for real-time data. More specifically, I am looking at techniques to increase the efficiency of delivering audiovisual data to heterogeneous sets of end-users. End-users differ in both the capabilities of their receiving device (e.g. PDA versus PC) and the network that connects them to each other (e.g. wired versus wireless). For example, since PDAs normally have a much smaller display than PC monitors, PDA users typically prefer low resolution versions of videos, while PC users want to watch the video at the highest resolution possible. In this context, I am looking at topics such as

• transcoding video streams to a lower quality
• increasing the error resilience of audiovisual data
• intelligent caching of audiovisual data inside the network

Finally, I am also interested in real-time computer animation. My school thesis, which is titled "Avatar animation in networked virtual environments", was situated in this research area. You can download my thesis here (unfortunately in Dutch only).