I’m a senior researcher at imec and teach at Ghent University, in the IDLab research group in Belgium. My work focuses on one question: how can you trust the software and AI you depend on? That covers where it runs, what is inside it, and who can see the data it processes.

I combine research, open source, and standardization work, and explain the results to engineers, decision makers, and the general public. Contact me or see Speaking & consulting if you’re looking for a speaker, expert insight, or research collaborations.

What I work on

I lead a team working on cybersecurity and trust for software and AI. We work full stack, from chip to data platform.

• Protecting data and software from physical and digital attacks. Keeping sensitive data and algorithms safe, even on hardware or in clouds you don’t control, using technologies such as confidential computing.
• AI supply chain insight & trust. Knowing what goes into software and AI models, and what that means for European legislation such as the Cyber Resilience Act. We use tools like Software and AI Bills of Materials (SBOM/AIBOM) to make that visible.
• Trustworthy & robust distributed systems. Deploying and managing software and AI across clouds and devices, and isolating it so attacks can’t spread and AI agents stay within their bounds.

Most of my impact today comes through my team. I supervise seven PhD researchers and manage international research projects with industry and academia, such as the EU projects ELASTIC, FOCAL, and CRACY. My job is to set the direction, find the funding and partners, and help each researcher grow into an independent expert.

A second part of my job is to teach at Ghent University. I’m lecturer-in-charge of Distributed Systems Design and teach courses on cloud computing and software engineering. I also give guest lectures on open source software, GDPR, WebAssembly, and more.

Concrete examples

• An opinion piece by my PhD student, Wiebe Vandendriessche, about AI supply chain transparency in the Flemish newspaper “De Tijd”: Om AI te vertrouwen moeten we de bouwstenen kennen (in Dutch)
• Co-author of proposed W3C WebAssembly System Interfaces for hardware access to USB, I2C and GPIO.
• Contributor to the ETSI cybersecurity standard for hypervisors and container runtimes under the EU Cyber Resilience Act.
• Patent-pending system to enforce data policies when data is processed on someone else’s infrastructure: Two-Way Confidential VMs (2cVM): Collaborative Confidential Computing for Mutually Distrustful Parties
• Long-time contributor to the Ubuntu ecosystem
  • Since 2022, I’ve been part of the Ubuntu Community Council, where I work on the governance structures of the Ubuntu community and its interface with Canonical.
  • I maintained several Snap packages, including Signal Desktop and Arduino IDE, and I’m an admin of Snapcrafters.
  • I helped design version 2.0 of the charms.reactive framework, which powered Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack and Kubernetes distributions.
  • I helped kickstart the Ubuntu community theme, and suggested naming it “Yaru”.

For the full record, see the following.

• Publication history
• Lectures and courses
• Supervised master’s theses
• Awards

Outside work

Certified cyborg. I want to make the world a better place. Proud husband of Anne Fonteyn and loving dad of two cats: Simba the floofball and Panda the gooby baby. I enjoy unique foods, hiking, and games with a good story.

In my free time, I enjoy helping communities build stable governance. Aside from the Ubuntu Community Council work, I wrote the Hackerspace Blueprint, explaining how to run leaderless collectives using do-ocracy.