Curriculum Vitae

Big Data Scientist - Hippo Enthusiast

Currently working at iMinds - Data Science Lab. My current responsibilities consist of R&D-consultancy and Big Data education at Ghent University.

R&D Consultance with Onforce: Ontoforce, a successful startup, develops a product called DisQover which is an exploratory UI on top of a Semantic Search application. Data sources used by DisQover are often Linked Open Datasets in the field of Life Sciences. The IWT project we are conducting together studies the feasibility of distributed querying by extensive benchmarking. We study different approaches for scaling out their infrastructure: scalable RDF triple stores (=graph databases), compression techniques (HDT), federated querying of SPARQL endpoints on the Web and classic Big Data tools such as Impala, SparkSQL and Hadoop.

Big Data Science Trainer: In 2015 I authored the Ugent Big Data Science course which consists of 10 theory sessions (2.5 hours) and 8 hands-on sessions. February 2016 - June was the first test run of the course which received positive feedback of the Computer Science Master students. The theory sessions cover:

  • Big Data Management: NoSQL stores, Big Data platforms (Hadoop & Spark) and architectures, the Semantic Web, Stream management
  • Big Data Analytics: Data Mining, network analytics and large-scale machine learning.
  • Big Data Visualization: Principles and tools for designing custom interactive data visualizations on the Web.
The lab sessions cover most aspects of the data mining life cycle and used jupyter notebooks and python (pyspark). The lab sessions on data visualizations covered D3.js and Leaflet.js which require javascript.