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About my work

SRON Utrecht

SRON
Since 2007, I work as software design engineer at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Utrecht.

SRON's engineering division develops instruments for scientific research in space. Some instruments are used to study stars and galaxies (astrophysics) while others are used to study the earth and its atmosphere (earth observation). Because space instruments are so complex, SRON often develops only a specific part of an instrument, such as the sensor or the read-out electronics.

I am involved in the TROPOMI project. TROPOMI is an instrument which will fly in a satellite, looking down at the earth. It measures the spectrum of infrared radiation, which gives information about the chemical composition of the atmosphere. It will, for example, be able to measure air pollution. We are currently developing the front-end electronics for the short-wave infrared channel.

University of Amsterdam
In 2006 and 2007, I was a scientific computer programmer in the Information and Language Processing Systems group at the University of Amsterdam.
My main project was ITEQA: Inference for Temporal Question Answering. Our goal was to extract time related information from texts, and to use that information to make a computer find the answers to questions about the text. We developed a computer program which recognizes time related phrases in text and tries to determines the exact point in time that they refer to.

Eljakim IT
From 2002 until 2006, I worked at Eljakim Information Technology in Utrecht.
Eljakim is a small software company with a focus on development of backoffice database applications and web based databases. My work involved mostly software development, but also some database design and some system administration. I did a lot of programming in PHP, using MySQL for data storage.

School

TU Delft
I studied computer science at Delft University of Technology from 1996 to 2002. My favorite course was fundamentals of computer science, and I was a lab assistant for this course in 2000/2001.

I graduated in 2002 in the field of parallel and distributed systems, after working as an intern for one year at the NIKHEF physics institute in Amsterdam. My research involved studying the data acquisition system of the ANTARES neutrino detector.
More details are in my master's thesis: Data Transmission in the Antaras Data Acquisition System.

Highschool
I attended de Samenwerkingsschool voor HAVO/Atheneum in Waddinxveen, which was later merged into het Coenecoop College.


2011-04-24 Joris van Rantwijk