Ton Akkermans was born in 1959, in Breda, the Netherlands. He received his M.Sc. in (Theoretical) Electrical Engineering from the Eindhoven University of Technology and joined in 1982 Philips Research Laboratories where he worked on geometrical and diffraction optics, optical alignment systems, projection TV, wafer steppers (ASML) and computer generated holographics.Since 1987, he has been engaged at Philips Optical Storage in the development of the digital servo ICs for optical disc systems. His work concerned the development of optical simulation tools, bit-stream conversion techniques, auto-calibrating methods, Adaptive Control and Mechatronics. As Principal System Architect he was responsible for the servo architectures of CD-R/RW and DVD products until mid 2000. In 2000 he joined the Processing Architectures for Content Management group within Philips Research and developed architectures for copy control and key management systems (DRM) and worked on time-frequency Watermarking techniques. In 2003 he started the research on Biometrics, Physical Unclonable Functions and privacy protection architectures related to Biometric Identification. In 2008 two start-up companies GenKey (formerly PrivID, Private Biometrics) and IntrinsicID (PUFs) were spun out from Philips Research. In 2009 he was co-initiator of the European Home Safety project Guarantee (ITEA2) and started the project as the project manager. In 2011 he switched over to the Personal Healthcare in Philips Research and worked on Nutrient Monitoring projects that aim to predict and estimate the nutrients, vitamins and caloric intake of people. From 2012 to 2018, the main focus of his work was on unobtrusive continuous monitoring for (early) detection of cardio-respiratory diseases.He has published a number of papers and is worldwide holder of more than 75 patents in the above mentioned fields.Expertise: Geometrical and Diffraction/Fourier Optics1D and 2D Digital Signal ProcessingServo and Digital Control and Servo techniquesMechatronicsBiometrics and Pattern recognitionKnowledge of Machine LearningKnowlegde of IC integrationKnowlegde of Cryptography and Key management systems