I’m a Professor of Decentralized Web Technology at IDLab of Ghent University – imec and a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Martin School within the University of Oxford. I’m also a Solid Ecosystem Architect for Inrupt and an advisor to other companies. From this hybrid academic and industrial perspective, my professional goal is to support Solid on its mission to inspire, transform, and reshape our data-driven society.

As a computer scientist, I investigate how decentralized knowledge graphs on the Web can lead us into the post-Big Data era, where companies realize that data harvesting as a business model is a dead end. The future consists of lots of small data that is linked. People will be in control of where they store their data and with whom they share it, independently of the services they use. I’m researching and implementing technologies that enable us to effect this socio-economic change on both a local and a global scale.