Curriculum Vitae

Personal Information

G.H.M. (Gert) van Valkenhoef
Address: Groningen, The Netherlands (details on request)
E-mail: g.h.m.van.valkenhoef [at] rug [dot] nl
Phone: (on request)

Date of Birth: 1985-07-25 (ISO-8601 format)
Citizenship: Dutch
Sex: Male

Education and training

Primary education

  • PhD (April 2009 - March 2013) at the University of Groningen.
    A PhD in the context of the Top Institute Pharma project Escher. In this project, we develop an information system to support the drug development and drug assessment processes. See drugis.org for more information.
    • Research: 5 published journal papers (and 4 under review), 1 conference paper, presented at 4 international and 10 national conferences and scientific meetings.
    • Software: "GeMTC" mixed treatment comparisons library, "hitandrun" R package, contributions to "JSMAA" decision analysis software and "ADDIS" decision support system.
    • Management: managed a small team of up to 4 software developers, developing the "ADDIS" decision support system (September 2009 - current).
    • Teaching: (co-)supervised 2 MSc and 2 BSc thesis projects, gave a short course on mixed treatment comparisons and decision analysis at the School of Pharmacy, University of Eastern Finland.
    • Courses: Mixed Treatment Comparisons (Bristol & Leicester University), Drug Development & Approval (TI Pharma), Drug Discovery & Development Cycle (TI Pharma), Systematic Review & Meta-Analysis (VUMC), Epidemiology and Applied Statistics (UMCG), Scientific Visualization (UoG), Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) summer school (2010), Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering (SSAIE) summer school (2009).
    Preliminary Abstract (click to expand)
  • Artificial Intelligence Master (Feb 2007 - Apr 2009) at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (University of Groningen).
    A two year programme, including a 45 ECTS thesis project. I negotiated an alternative programme that includes several courses from the University of Amsterdam (Quantum Computing, Recursion Theory and Lambda Calculus), a 12 ECTS minor project and a number of courses dealing with (multi-)agent systems and software engineering.
    Degree received: 2009-04-19 (cum laude)
  • Artificial Intelligence Bachelor (Sep 2003 - Feb 2007) at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (University of Groningen).
    Topics included formal logics, biopsychology / neurology, mathematics, programming, language processing, (heuristic) search, cognitive modelling and ergonomics.
    Degree received: 2007-04-15 (cum laude)
  • Secondary Education (Sep 1997 - Jun 2003): VWO (Preparatory Scientific Education).
    I completed the Natural Sciences tract complemented by Computer Science and Management & Organization at the Farel College in Amersfoort.

Other training and certificates

  • English Level 4 (Advanced, C1 level) (Feb 2007 - May 2007) at the Language Center of Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
  • Certificate 'Sociale Hygiëne' (Jun 2006)
    In the Netherlands, this certificate is a requirement for a café or restaurant permit. It includes understanding the everyday considerations of such an establishment as well as dealing with drug and alcohol abuse.

Work Experience

Programming experience

  • Web developer (Aug 2005 - Aug 2006, Apr 2007 - Sep 2007) at Accepté B.V..
    Accepté is a Dutch company building customized CMS solutions, community websites and payment services. Tasks included software and database design and implementation. Primarily PHP and HTML/CSS work, occasionally Java.
  • Webmaster (2002 - 2005) for FysioAmersfoort.
    Developing and maintaining a PHP/XML backend with HTML/CSS frontend.

Teaching experience

  • Student assistant (May 2009 - Jun 2009) for 'Advanced Logics'
  • Student assistant (Apr 2008 - Jun 2008) for 'Advanced Logics'
    My second assistantship for this course, this time in an intensified format, in which all lectures and tutorial sessions were held over a four week period. I also took over most classes from the second assistent, who fell ill during the course.
  • Student assistant (Feb 2008 - Apr 2008) for 'Multi-agent Systems'
    A course in the master Artificial Intelligence that covers formal systems for reasoning about multi-agent systems. Tasks included grading of homework and evaluating projects.
  • Student assistant (Apr 2007 - Jul 2007) for 'Systems and Signals'
    A second year course on signal processing. I supervised exercise sessions as well as practicals. Other tasks were grading homework and the exam.
  • Student assistant (Feb 2007 - Apr 2007) for 'Artificial Intelligence 1'
    A first-year course in the Artificial Intelligence bachelor. Topics were (heuristic) search, constraint satisfaction, rule based and logical inference, Bayesian networks, ontologies and version spaces. Tasks were guiding the practical sessions, compiling and grading the exercises and grading the exam.
  • Student assistant (Dec 2006 - Feb 2007) for 'Advanced Logics'
    A second-year course in the Artificial Intelligence bachelor. It covered modal logics and some of their applications, lambda calculus and computational complexity. Tasks were guiding 'exercise sessions', grading weekly homework, compiling and grading the exam.

Volunteer activities

  • Internet help desk volunteer (Sep 2006 - Aug 2008)
    Help desk volunteer for campus-net like internet connections for a large student building in Groningen. Troubleshooting, mediating abuse cases and participating in monthly meetings to discuss policy and infrastructure improvements with the University of Groningen. Taking minutes of the monthly meetings from October 2007 onwards.
  • Bar committee chairman (Jun 2005 - Jun 2007)
    Preparing and presiding over regular meetings, continuous management tasks.
  • Bar committee volunteer (May 2004 - Aug 2007)
    Tasks included bar tending, organising parties, designing promotional materials and building websites.

Accomplishments and projects

  • Master's thesis (Sep 2008 - Apr 2009)
    A 45 ECTS master's research project in the area of market-based control of multi-agent systems, under the supervision of Nick Jennings at the University of Southampton. More information can be found on my Master's thesis page.
  • Elaborations on OOPS (Jan 2008 - May 2008)
    A 12 ECTS (336 hour) project that tied up some loose ends, especially in the formal properties of the OOPS proof system. This includes some simplifications to the implementation, a demonstration of soundness and completeness of the algorithm, an implementation of a visual tableau inspector, analysis of complexity and an investigation into heuristics in the proof search.
  • OOPS - Object Oriented Prover for S5n (Mar 2007 - May 2007)
    A tableau proof system for the S5n Epistemic Logic written in Java. Created for the Multi-Agent Systems AI master course, together with Elske van der Vaart. The entire project was done in just under 70 hours per person.
  • Bachelor's thesis (Sep 2006 - Feb 2007) in Dutch
    Creating and investigating a simulation of many agents interacting to vary their internal language vector. The idea was to generate complex phenomena that are also seen in real language change. (Model in Java, also including an advanced clustering algorithm with information theoretic heuristics.)
  • Passed the Propaedeutic Examination of Artificial Intelligence Cum Laude (Sep 2003 - Jun 2004)
  • Completed Frank Brokken's "Programming in C/C++" course (Sep 2004 - Mar 2005)
    This course consisted of three parts. The first covered the basic building blocks of the language in a very in-depth manner. The second part covered object-oriented design, whereas the third part discussed C++ templates and parser generation.
    The course required handing in of weekly exercises (about 16 hours of work every week), on which grades were based. I completed all three parts with very high grades.
  • Completed most of the first semester of Physics in parallel with Artificial Intelligence (2003)
  • (2002 - present) Various small, but non-trivial (paid or unpaid) coding projects
    CLI and GUI programs, websites and contributions to open source projects using a plethora of languages, APIs, frameworks etc.
  • (1997 - 2001) Self taught VBA and C programming, HTML/CSS and JavaScript
    Notably, I built a collection of VBA macros with an easy to use interface to assist my mother with the bookkeeping for her new company.

Skills Summary

  • Significant experience with
    • Refactoring and design patterns
    • Java 1.4 and 1.5
    • C / C++
    • PHP, Python web programming
    • Relational databases
  • Familiar with
    • Research: experiment design and analysis
    • C#, .NET framework
    • GUI design/programming
    • Use of XHTML, XML, CSS and JavaScript
    • Functional programming (Haskell)
    • Logics programming (Prolog)
    • R statistics package
    • Highly automated document typesetting using LaTeX, Sweave and make
  • Problem solving skills from Mathematics, Physics and Artificial Intelligence
  • Management and educational experience
  • Knowledge of and experience with software engineering practice, special interest in Agile methods
  • The ability to quickly master new languages, tools and concepts