B.L. De Vries Email & Phone Number

Amsterdam Area, Netherlands

At SURF I work on several visualisation and machine learning projects and I give courses on scientific visualisation. Currently I am working on ray tracing in curved space-time. Implementing numerical solutions to Einsteins theory of gravity into Blender and making realistic images of blackholes. Check it out here: https://github.com/bldevries/blackhole_geodesic_calculator

Amsterdam En Omgeving, Nederland

One of the projects I worked on is "Emotion Recognition in Dementia. Advancing technology for multimodal analysis of emotion expression in everyday life". My task was (1) to use machine learning to analyse video data, extracting facial and spoken expressions and (2) to make custom visualisations for the results and interpretation. This was a collaboration with groups at the University of Twente and the academic hospital of Groningen (UMCG).I also worked on machine learning for detecting indoor crowd densities using Wi‑Fi signals of mobile phones. For more information see the paper linked below.

The Netherlands

Stockholm Astrobiology Centre, Sweden

During my stay at the Stockholm Observatory I set up an interdisciplinary team with expertise in astronomy, mineralogy and meteoritics. The aim was to search for observables of planet(tesimal) evolution in other planetary systems. The idea I suggested was to measure meteoritic minerals in the laboratory (in the mid infrared) in such a way that we can directly compare them to astronomical observation. In the end I was able to access the meteorite collection and laboratories of the Natural Museum of History in Stockholm. They taught me how to use equipment like X-ray diffraction analysers and transmission FTIR spectrographs. In the end I combined our measurements with other types of measurement and observation of many other group to a large data set of hundreds of spectra. This data leads to several scientific papers in the near future.Besides the work in the laboratory I also continued the work I did during my PhD. With colleagues in Amsterdam and Leuven I analysed infrared spectra of planet forming disks around young and evolved stars. I applied my knowledge of calculating optical cross sections, modelling of mid and far infrared spectra to these projects. These projects led to several publications. During the two years in Stockholm I also gave several lectures of master level courses at the university. Organised student visits to the Museum of Natural History and helped with public telescope viewings at the Observatory. I also travelled to several international conferences to present the scientific results of colleagues and I.

Leuven, Belgium

During my PhD I performed data analysis on infrared observations from, among others, the Herschel Space Observatory. This space telescope was launched at the start of my PhD and I obtained several observing hours through a competitive, peer-reviewed application procedure. For the analysis of the data I modelled radiative transfer processes and the interaction of small rocky grains with light. In finding optimal solutions I applied several statistical methods for solution optimization. The modelling and analysis was done by writing code in languages like python, java and fortran on Linux and Mac systems as well as integrating self written code with code written by team-members and experts in their respective field.Collaborators and I published our scientific results in several scientific, peer-reviewed journals. Most notably we published one of our results in the high-impact journal Nature, on which I was the lead and first author (see the document below). I have presented these results together with my collaborators at several international conferences, speaking to audiences of several hundreds of people.During my PhD I also had the following responsibilities:- I was responsible for and operated the Mercator telescope (La Palma, Canary Islands) for several weeks a year. - I supervised or contributed to several projects of bachelor and master students. - I taught exercise classes to first year engineers and science students in subjects of electricity and magnetism and held several presentations at local observatories for a layman public.

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Astrophysics

* Incl. first author Nature publication

Msc, Astrophysics, Cum Laude

* Cum Laude * Minor in Computer Science * Selection of courses in Philosophy

High School

Groningen, The Netherlands.