contact
- email: nikvaes@gmail.com
External profiles
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikvaessen
- GitHub: https://github.com/nikvaessen
- Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9zWwbA4AAAAJ&hl=en
About me
I am a nerd, first and foremost, someone who likes to tinker with computers and software. I have an interest in board games, video games, and science fiction stories in book and video format :).
Here’s a list of my favourites:
- Board games: Dune: Imperium, Terraforming Mars, Hanabi
- Video games: DotA 2, Portal 2, FTL: faster than light
- TV series: Mr Robot, Better Call Saul, House of Cards (s1 and s2)
- Books: The Stormlight Archive, The Expanse, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, The Kingkiller Chronicle
I am in the process of obtaining a PhD from Radboud University.
Minor life-story ;)
I first interacted with a personal computer around the age of 6, at my grandparents place. At home, we did not have a personal computer at the time, but my granddad had a computer in order to work with spreadsheets, with an internet connection! Only around the age of 9 did I get a PC with an internet connection, in the living room. I used this to play RuneScape adamantly, and in high-school, I switched to League of Legends, and later, DotA 2. During my whole youth, I always had the inkling to learn programming. I remember lying awake at night around the age of 14, wishing I understood how to program, and how computers worked. However, I never took it upon myself to learn properly, not finding the right resources to do so on the internet at the time. I remember being very disappointed that my high school was not able to offer programing classes, because not enough people signed up. I initially went to university to study Biomedical Science, with the lofty goal of studying cancer and curing it. During this first year, massive online open courses became more well known, such at the EDX and coursera platforms. I started Harvard’s CS50 on EDX in my free-time, and this sparked my software engineering journey. Finally, an online resource to learn programming which clicked with me! At the end of the year, my bachelor also had a short, 4 week long “Introduction to Programming” course. I found that course so interesting, I decided I HAD to switch to the only computer-related bachelor program my university offered, namely, Data Science and Knowledge Engineering, if only to try it for a year.
In the end, I completed this bachelor, and followed it up with a master in computer science at KTH, in Stockholm. After which I started a PhD in speech technology/deep learning at Radboud University.