Arjen P. de Vries

Feel free to look at my RESEARCH PAGE, my (Dutch) EDUCATIONAL PAGE or my PERSONAL PAGE. You can also listen to the correct pronunciation of my name, or find my curriculum vitae if you are planning to offer me an interesting job.

Research interests

Reducing information overload, advanced database technology, scalable and efficient query processing, object oriented systems, development of systems that even normal people will use (who is normal though?).

This should concern you

We need privacy and free speech. Apparently, this is not clear to many goverments around the world. Information about these issues can be found clicking the symbols on the right.

Who am I

I'm a staff member of the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) at the University of Twente. Since November 15th, 1995, I have been a PhD student associated to the database group of the department of computer science and the department of ergonomics. Up to date information can be found browsing my research pages.

Guru qualifications

Apart from being a reasonably experienced team sailor (never beat the English students though), some people tend to consult me professionally for help in some fields.

Having been forced to use UNIX during my master's thesis work at Digital, I acquired some basic UNIX skills for beginning gurus. After loosing many discussions with Raman about the usefulness of PC software, I recently gave up trying to use other operating systems since they lack too many features. Raman, you were right! I even installed Linux on the PC at the ergonomics department.

Most of my office time, I spend using Emacs. Emacs is my mailer, LaTeX front-end and news reader. Although people keep telling me emacs stands for escape-meta-alt-control-shift (leaving your nose for the function key), I am very impressed by the functionality of this tool.

Most of my time left for acquiring guru abilities, I spend to learn the ins and outs of Java programming. I feel definitely like a member of the "Java promo team" at our department. To my opinion, Java should be the main platform for all programming education at university of Twente.

Finally, I start to use the Illustra database system on a somewhat frequent basis. However, I am far too far from being even a beginning guru for that platform. Also, I used perl for the whole summer so I know my regexps by now.

A short history lesson

I did my Master's project at the Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL) of Digital Equipment Coorporation. My price-winning supervisor was T.V. Raman. Feel free to take a look at the slides of the talk I gave about my project. You can also take a look at an overview (HTML) of the project or download my thesis (postscript). Summer 1997 I also worked at CRL, this time under Brian Eberman on a multimedia database project. We continue to work together for the rest of my PhD program.

Education

The Dutch educational system is different from the American. We have a longer highschool and no bachelor's degrees. Instead, after the highschool that gives permission to attend university, you study 4 years or 5 years officially (depends on the topic) and 5 to 7 years practically. After completion you are an ingenieur (ir.) or a doctorandus (drs.), degrees compatible with M.S.

Public key

If you would like to send me an encrypted message, you can use the following PGP public key:

Last updated: $Id: home.html,v 1.3 1999/10/11 12:09:10 arjen Exp arjen $
Maintained by: arjen@cs.utwente.nl