PhD holder and certified cyborg. I enjoy special foods, hiking, and games with a good story. I want to make the world a better place.

I’m a senior researcher at imec and teaching fellow at Ghent University in the IDLab research group in Belgium.

Research

I lead a number of research tracks focused on software deployment and trust in the cloud and on devices.

• Making it easier to deploy and manage complex applications, both in the cloud and on IoT devices
• Ensuring operators can verify and trust the software running on a device or in the cloud
• Improving the security of processing sensitive data with confidential algorithms

I manage international research projects in collaboration with industry and academia, advise PhD students, coach researchers, and develop research proposals.

Open source is a common thread in my work, both as an enabler for trust and as a way to increase the impact of my research. I’m involved both at the governance level, for example as part of the Ubuntu Community Council, and at a technical level, for example, building WebAssembly System Interfaces with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and the Bytecode Alliance.

Interests: WebAssembly, Confidential Computing, Kubernetes, Virtualization, Open Source, the intersection between law and IT

See my full publication record on ResearchGate.

Lectures & keynotes

I teach at Ghent University and frequently speak for industry professionals and the general public on topics such as

• Infrastructure as Code
• Open Source software and AI
• Distributed Systems Design
• OS and network security

I’m always happy to share my knowledge and help solve problems, so let me know if you need an expert!

Open Source & Community

• I’m part of the Ubuntu Community council since 2022.
• I’m maintaining a bunch of Snap packages including Signal Desktop, Arduino IDE, PhotoScape and Easy OpenVPN Server.
• I contribute to the snapcraft.io ecosystem by writing documentation, blog posts, and PR’s for snapcraft and snapd.
• I helped kickstart the Ubuntu community theme initiative, although my biggest contribution there might have been suggesting to call it “Yaru”.
• I used to be very active in the Juju community, writing a bunch of Big Data Charms as part of the Tengu Team, writing a bunch of documentation, and helping design the 2.0 version of the charms.reactive framework and writing a paper about how cool it is. Had the great pleasure of being appreciated by Jorge Castro and can confirm he is a Chinese botnet.
• I answered a bunch of questions on AskUbuntu.
• I wrote the Hackerspace Blueprint; a booklet about how to run a leaderless organization using do-ocracy.

Family

Proud husband of Anne Fonteyn and loving dad of two cats: Simba the floofball and Panda the gooby baby.