Name: Dr. Werner Van Belle
e-mail: werner@sigtrans.org, werner.van.belle@gmail.com
Webpage: http://werner.sigtrans.org/
Address: Entenweidstrasse 4, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland
Phone: Work: (+41) 61 387 31 91
Date of birth: 21 June 1975
Place of birth: Anderlecht, Belgium
Nationality: Belgian
Marital Status: Not married
Military Service: None; not obligatory in Belgium since
1975
Drivers License: B (cars and small motorcycles). No practice
since 1995
Languages: Dutch & English
My expertise lies in three distinct areas: a) bioinformatics (detailed in section 4.1.4, 4.1.2, 4.1.3 & 4.1.1), b) signal processing (detailed in section 4.2.1, 4.2.2, 4.1.4 & 4.1.3) and c) distributed systems (detailed in section 4.3.4, 4.3.3, 4.3.2 & 4.3.1);. My education summarized by the dissertations,
| Employer | Group | Position | Start Date |
Time
VUB |
Abbreviations: VUB = Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Brussels University); UiTø = University of Tromsø; UNN = University Hospital of Northern Norway; BSSE = Department for Biosystems Science and Engineering
From March 2008 to March 2009 I was responsible for setting up a primary analysis pipeline for the Deep Sequencing Facility in Basel. This included various aspects among which understanding the Illumina software but also administrative issues such as sample tracking and data delivery. In the end, this project was at an impasse. With on one side an IT department that refused to do what we needed (making backups, installing web servers and installing databases was 'not their job') and on another side a research department that did not see the need for an official software project because they did not want to understand the basic steps of software engineering: requirement analysis, system design, implementation, validation etc. This part of the work was highly unrewarding, even to the point that I left the DBSSE entirely.
A second aspect of my work at DBSSE was research on how to analyze genomic signal track and how to find useful relations between these tracks. To this end I tested a number of novel approaches on Human Histone Methylation and Acetylation patterns. This was very interesting and offered a number of novel insights.
In connection with the Virology department of the University Of Tromso, I investigated the measurement accuracy of the microarray facility. This resulted in the development of a new technique in which confidence intervals on all the measured dots are reported. This information was further used to integrate a protein interaction map and predict which proteins are likely influenced by/will likely influence MK5.
In connection with Haukeland University Hospital (Bergen) we investigated P53 (a protein related to cell life and death and its gene is often mutated in cancer). We received bio-signatures of P53 expression for various leukemia patients and got the challenge to analyse these. First we needed to remove various artifacts from the images, including camera geometry artifacts, washing and drying effects, scratches, bubbles, light conditions and translational, rotational and zooming variances. In this research we developed a novel denoising technique. Afterwards, alignment was necessary and the analysis of the actual data. This led to a novel analysis technique that is being patented.
MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry is a well known and widely used technique to fingerprint and sequence proteins. However widely used, the signal output of these machines often contain disturbing artifacts such as static tones, linearly up-sweeping tones, exponentially decaying tones and probabilistic pulse trains. Their presence reduces the accuracy of peak localization and might introduce phantom peaks. This further complicates a) automatic selection of peaks, b) makes it impossible to normalize mass spectrogram's and c) in general reduces the performance of high throughput proteomics. We developed a) a number of specialized algorithms to remove these artifacts, based on wavelets, and b) a number of techniques to automatically assign confidence scores to peaks, based on auto-correlation techniques and machine modelling. The combination of the presented techniques allow for an accurate and automated sample analysis, which in turn helps in the determination of the sample content.
In 2001 I created a fully automatic BPM counter to measure the tempo of music. This is done by autocorrelation, which in itself is not a new technique, however at that moment the use of this technique to measure the tempo was entirely new. Over the years this program has been extended to recognize sound spectra, rhythmical information, ambiance and compositional information. This allows the program to automatically select matching songs, cluster them and visualize them using a PCA analysis. More information can be found at http://bpmdj.sourceforge.net/. The current modules include
Tempo module - Five different tempo measurement techniques are available of which auto-correlation and ray-shooting are most appropriate. All analyzers in BpmDj make use of the Bark psycho-acoustic scale. The spectrum or sound color is visualized as a 3 channel color (red/green/blue) based on a Karhunen-Loéve transform of the available songs.
Echo/delay Modules - Measuring the echo characteristics is based on a distribution analysis of the frequency content of the music and then enhancing it using a differential auto-correlation.
Rhythm/composition modules - Rhythm and composition properties
rely on correct tempo information. Rhythm relies on cross correlation
and overlaying of all available measures. Composition relies on measuring
the probability of a composition change after
measures.
From an end-user point of view the program supports distributed analysis, automatic mixing of music, distance metrics for all analyzers as well as clustering and automatic classification based on this information. Everything is tied together in a Qt based user interface.
Cryosleep is a program that generates soothing brainwaves relying on the bi-aural effect. I developed this from 2003 to 2005 and has proven to be a very popular download. The value of the program comes both from its unique noise shaped frequency spectrum (the sounds are very 'friendly' to listen to) and its free availability at http://werner.onlinux.be/Cryosleep. Cryosleep relies on a power-law to alternate the composition and on the bark psycho-acoustic scale for frequency selection.
In 2006 I became involved with ship to shore protocols -or- how to solve very practical network problems with the following requirements: a) the off-boat interface can change at any time, but the internal network needs to stay fully connected b) how to bring up/down outgoing links; c) how to control incoming and outgoing connections based on current cost-rate and d) how to install a least cost routing engine on such a router ? To approach this problem we investigated NuFw, IPv6 and Mobile IP.
From 2001 to 2003 I wrote my PhD, a monograph titled ``Creation of an Intelligent Concurrency Adaptor in order to mediate the Differences between Conflicting Concurrency Interfaces''. It contained 14 distinct chapters, of which 10 standing independent. The full text is available on my homepage. In summary, I investigated a particular problem of open distributed systems namely: concurrency management between components written by different manufacturers. All too often, the concurrency-strategy provided or required by a component is badly documented and rarely matches the concurrency strategy provided or required by other components. Whenever this happens there is a concurrency interface conflict. Solving such conflicts can require a substantial amount of manpower, especially because in open distributed systems components can be updated without prior notification and without guarantees that new interfaces are backward compatible. Concurrency behavior modifications can range from syntactic modifications over slight semantic differences to completely new concurrency strategies. For example, changing a nested locking strategy to a non-nested locking strategy or changing a non-blocking server to work in a blocking manner.
I approached the presented problem by automatically generating a concurrency interface adaptor between various provided an required concurrency behaviors. This process required the formal documentation of the involved concurrency interface by means of colored Petri-nets. Once these are available, a concurrency adaptor is deployed in two stages. The first stage learns how to reach various check points in both the server code and client code, thereby bypassing the concurrency behavior entirely. Then the second stage observe the requested state in the client and realizes it in the server by linking together the common functional Petri-net places (a functional place is one not related to the concurrency strategy).
I have been fully involved in the SEESCOA project, which stands for ``Software Engineering for Embedded Systems using a Component Oriented Approach''. The project ran from October 1999 till September 2003. 4 academic partners were involved: 1) the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) with PROG ('Programming Technology Lab') and SELL (Laboratory for Software engineering). 2) the PARIS research group of the RUG ('Rijks Univeristeit Gent'). 3) the DISTRINET research group of the KUL (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) and 4) the EDM Research group ('Expertise for digital media') of the LUC ('Limburgs Universitair Centrum').
The IWT funded the main chunk of the project with 2 mil EUR. 6 industrial partners were involved. These were: Siemens, Barco-Graphics, Agfa Gevaert, Imec, Philips and Alcatel. Key points of this period:
During 4 years I've been the creator and maintainer of the Borg mobile multi agent system. We viewed a mobile multi-agent as a standalone component that can communicate with other agents and migrate between places (processors). Our research aimed to conceive a distributed system and language that would allow the development of such mobile agents, without presenting the agent programmer with non functional aspects such as connection establishment, fault tolerance and so on.
During this time I researched which distribution aspects one can hide (at an acceptable price) and which ones not. In the end we were able to shield the programmer from finding the communication partners. We provided transparent communication, location transparent migration and transparent replication. We were unable to hide concurrency management (due to its inherent complexity). Therefore we developed a set of control flow modules that abstrahate around typical usage scenarios (whiteboard communication, one-to-many, many-to-one and voting patterns). Later on, this led to the applicability of Petri-nets as a modeling technique.
The Borg mobile multi agent system uses the educational language Pico as its basis. It was developed by my former adviser and due its proper memory and stack discipline enabled strong migration already in 1998. Key-points of this period:
* is the corresponding author.
are equal contributors.
The publications and presentations below only include those related to computer science. See the full length CV for a complete overview. The file CV-cs-abstracts includes the abstracts.
1. Werner Van Belle![]()
, Jessie Dedecker
; Ambient Actors as a Formalism for Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing; Handbook for Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing; American Scientific Publishers; October 2006
2. Werner Van Belle
; Dj-ing under Linux with Bpmdj; Linux+ Magazine; nr 25; October 2006
3. Jessie Dedecker
, Werner Van Belle![]()
; Actors for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (The Ambient Actor Model); Proceedings of Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing (EUC2004); Springer Verlag; Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS 3207); Editor(s) Aizu-Wakamatsu; pages 482-494; August 2004
4. Jessie Dedecker
, Werner Van Belle, Wolfgang De Meuter; Actors for Pervasive Computing; Proceeding of the workshop on reference architectures and patterns for pervasive computing (OOPSLA2003); June 2003
5. Werner Van Belle
, Tom Mens, Theo D'Hondt; Using Genetic Programming to Generate Protocol Adaptors for Interprocess Communication; Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware, Proceedings of the 5th Intl. Conference on Evolvable Systems (ICES2003); Springer Verlag: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS 2606); Editor(s) Andy M. Tyrrel and Pauline C. Haddow and Jim Torresen; pages 422-433; March 2003
6. Werner Van Belle
, Karsten Verelst, Kristof Van Buggenhout, Theo D'Hondt; Is Message Sending Good enough for Distributed Systems ? Communication and synchronisation revisited; Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the Distributed Object Workshop at the European Conference on Object Oriented Programming 2001 (ECOOP 2001); June 2001
7. Werner Van Belle
, Johan Fabry, Karsten Verelst, Theo D'Hondt; Experiences in Mobile Computing: The CBorg Mobile Multi-Agent System; Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems (TOOLS 38): Components for Mobile Computing; IEEE Computer Society Press; Los Alamitos, California; Editor(s) Wolfgang Pree; pages 7-18; March 2001
8. Werner Van Belle
, Karsten Verelst, Theo D'Hondt; The CBorg Mobile Multi-Agent System; Edited Volume on Infrastructures for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems; ACM; October 2000
9. Stefan Van Baelen
, David Urting, Werner Van Belle, Viviane Jonckers, Tom Holvoet, Yolande Berbers, Karel De Vlaminck; Towards a unified terminology for component-based development; Submitted to ECOOP 2000; June 2000
10. Werner Van Belle
, Theo D'Hondt; Agent mobility and Reification of Computational State; International Proceedings of Infrastructures for Agents, Multi-Agent Systems and Scalable Multi-Agent Systems; Springer Verlag; Lecture Notes in Artifical Intelligence (LNAI 1887); Editor(s) Tom Wagner and Omer Rana; pages 166-173; June 2000
11. Werner Van Belle
, Karsten Verelst, Theo D'Hondt; Location Transparent Routing in Mobile Agent Systems - Merging Name Lookups with Routing; 7th IEEE Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems; IEEE Computer Society Press; Los Alamitos, California; Editor(s) A. Denise Williams; pages 207-212; December 1999
12. Wolfgang De Meuter
, Kris De Volder, Werner Van Belle, Tom Tourwe, Theo D'Hondt; Prototype Based agents for the Web; Proceedings of the European Conference on Object Oriented Programming 1997 (ECOOP 1997), workshop on Prototype-Based Object-Oriented Programming; September 1997
1. Werner Van Belle
; An Adaptive Filter for the Correct Localization of Subimages: FFT based Subimage Localization Requires Image Normalization to work properly; Signal Processing; Yellowcouch Scientific; 11 pages; October 2007
2. Werner Van Belle
; Correlation between the inproduct and the sum of absolute differences is -0.8485 for uniform sampled signals on [-1:1]; Signal Processing; Yellowcouch Scientific; November 2006
3. Werner Van Belle
; Antenna Finding and Interpolation/Extrapolation of Signal Strength; November 2006
4. Werner Van Belle
; Observations on spectrum and spectrum histograms in BpmDj; September 2005
5. Werner Van Belle
; BPM Measurement of Digital Audio by Means of Beat Graphs & Ray Shooting; October 2004
6. Werner Van Belle
; The Failure of the Connectionless Model and the Vice Software Model; February 2004
7. Karsten Verelst
, Werner Van Belle, Theo D'Hondt; The Reflective Virtual Machine; June 2001
8. Karsten Verelst
, Werner Van Belle, Theo D'Hondt; Communication & Synchronization in Mobile Multi-Agent Systems, CSP Revisited; Submitted to workshop 23 at ECOOP 2000; March 2000
9. Werner Van Belle
; Reinforcement Learning as a Routing Technique for Mobile Multi Agent Systems; June 1998
1. Werner Van Belle
; Ship to Shore Communication; DUALOG Deliverable; 30 pages; August 2006
2. Werner Van Belle
; Stepwise Tempo Changes in BpmDj; May 2006
3. Werner Van Belle
; Component Oriented Design of the SEESCOA Common Test Case: The Controller and Zoom Behaviour; SEESCOA Deliverable 3.5; 10 of 126 pages; October 2001
4. Werner Van Belle
; Refinement of the SEESCOA Component Architecture; SEESCOA Deliverable 3.4; 36 pages; October 2001
5. Werner Van Belle
, David Urting; The SEESCOA Component System; SEESCOA Deliverable 3.3b; 62 pages; January 2001
6. Werner Van Belle![]()
, Tom Toutenel
, Viviane Jonckers; Real Time UML; SEESCOA Deliverable d2.1; 26 pages; April 2000
7. Werner Van Belle
, David Urting, Koen Debosschere, Yolande Berbers, Viviane Jonckers, Chris Luyten, Tom Toutenel; Working Definition of Components; SEESCOA Deliverable 1.4; 19 pages; April 2000
8. Koen Debosschere![]()
, Theo D'Hondt
, Yolande Berbers
, Viviane Jonckers
, Werner Van Belle
, Chris Luyten
, David Urting
, Tom Toutenel
; Common Test Case; SEESCOA Deliverable 1.3; 10 pages; April 2000
9. Werner Van Belle![]()
, Tom Toutenel
; Philips Visitation Report; SEESCOA Deliverable; 24 pages; April 2000
1. The Illumina GA II Sequencing System; presented at Department of Computer Science; ETH Zurich; Zurich, Switzerland, October 2008
2. Deep Sequencing Unit: Information Infrastructure; presented at ETH Zurich in Basel, Switzerland, April 2008
3. BpmDj and some High Level Concepts for Data Flow programming; presented at PLEIAD laboratory of the Computer Science Department of the University of Chile (Faculty of Engineering), Chile, January 2008
4. Concurrency Adaptation using Learning State Machines; presented at the computer science department of the university of Aberdeen, United Kingdom, August 2006
5. Data Driven Programming: Change Nets; presented at Norut IT, Tromso, Norway, November 2005
6. From Connection-less over Connection-oriented towards...; presented at the Computer Science Departement, University of Tromø, Norway, January 2004
7. The Development of an Intelligent Concurrency Adaptor in order To Mediate The Differences between Conflicting Concurrency Interfaces; presented at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Public Session PhD Defense, Belgium, November 2003; the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Closed Session PhD Defense, Belgium, September 2003
8. Automatic Generation of Concurrency Adaptors for Multi Agents; presented at the International Conference on Evolvable Systems 2003 (ICES03), Trondheim, Norway, March 2003
9. Adaptor Generation for Concurrency Interface Conflicts by Means of Petri-nets and Genetic Algorithms; presented at Institut f¨ur Informatik (IAM), Universit¨at Bern, Bern, Switzerland, November 2002
10. Automatic Adaptor Generation by Means of Evolution; presented at the Programming Technology Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussels (PROG/VUB), Belgium, May 2002
11. The Component Architecture; presented at Siemens ATEA, Herentals, Belgium, April 2002
12. Borg, a Way to hapiness in distributed environments: differences with pico; presented at the Prototype Meeting at the Programming Technology Lab (PROG), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, December 2001
13. Building Components for Mid-Scale Embedded Systems: What Kind of Infrastructure do we Need: the Component Architecture; presented at Philips TASS, Brussels, Belgium, December 2001
14. The Component System a bit further; presented at the SEESCOA Meeting Brussels, Belgium, October 2001
15. Concurrency Guarding and Error Resolution: Genetic Programming; presented at the Programming Technology Lab, Computer Science Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, September 2001
16. About the lack of concurrency control primitives in Open Distributed Object Systems; presented at the European Conference on Object Orientd Programming 2001 (ECOOP 2001), workshop 17 on object oriented distributed systems, Budapest, Hungary, June 2001
17. The Pitfalls of the Connectionless Component Model; presented at Inno.com, Beersel, Belgium, April 2001
18. Experiences in Mobile Computing: The CBorg Mobile Multi-Agent System; presented at the Conference on Technology of Object Oriented Languages and Systems, Eastern Europe (TOOLSEE 2001): Components for Mobile Computing, Zurich, Switzerland, March 2001
19. The Component System so far; presented at the SEESCOA User Group Meeting in Gent, Belgium, January 2001
20. Glueing Components in Wide Area Neworks; presented at the Programming Technology Lab, Computer Science Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, November 2000
21. The CBorg Mobile Multi Agent System: An Overview; presented at the Company Contact Presentation organized by the Programming Technology Lab (PROG), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, August 2000; Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France, June 2000
22. Agent Mobility and Reification of Computational State, an Experiment in Migration; presented at the European Conference on Object Oriented Programming 2000 (ECOOP 2000), Cannes, France, June 2000
23. Software Modelling Techniques for Embedded Systems; presented at a SEESCOA User Meeting, Belgium, April 2000
24. Components; presented at a SEESCOA User Meeting, Belgium, March 2000
25. Location Transparent Routing in Mobile Multi Agent Systems: Merging Name Lookups with Routing; presented at Conference on Future Trends in Distributed Computing (FTDCS 1999), Cape Town, South Africa, December 1999
26. Applicability Of UML/RT to Embedded Systems; presented at a SEESCOA Meeting at the Katholic University of Leuven, Belgium, November 1999
27. Gevalstudie Mobiele Multi-Agent Systemen: CBorg; presented at the SEESCOA Kick-off meeting, Computer Science Department (DISTRINET), Katholic University Leuven (KUL), Belgium, October 1999; the FKFO meeting Antwerpen, Universitaire Installing Antwerpen, Belgium, September 1999; the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, December 1998; the FKFO meeting Antwerpen, Universitaire Instelling Antwerpen, Belgium, December 1998
28. Positie Optimalisaties Mobiele Multi-Agent Systems: stand van zaken; presented at the Programming Technology Lab, Computer Science Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, November 1998
1. Theory and Exercises 'Concurrent Systems' - given at the VUB, academic year 2000-2001 for Franklin Vermeulen, aimed at the 3th year computer science, Vesalius college.
2. Exercises 'theory of database systems' - given at the VUB, academic year 1998-1999 for Robert Meersman, aimed at the 3th year of computer science.
3. Exercises 'Graphics' - given at the VUB, academic years 1998-2000 (2), for Theo D'Hondt, as an optional course in the 2nd cycle of the computer science curriculum.
4. Exercises 'Algorithms and Data Structures' - given at the VUB, academic year 1998-1999 (1), for Theo D'Hondt, aimed at the 2nd year computer science.
5. Exercises 'Distributed Systems' - given at the VUB, academic years 1998-2003 (5), for Marnix Goossens, aimed at the 2nd cycle of the standard computer science curriculum, the 2nd cycle of the applied computer science curriculum and the 3th year in teleinformatics.
6. Project guidance for a computer science course on Systems - given at ETH Zü rich, for Nessime Tatbul in conjunction with Nihal Dindar.
1. User Interface for Mobile Agent; Tan Jiaming; 1997-1998
2. Print Spooling: a Critical Approach Toward a Specific Problem in a Hybrid Environment; Dominique Kindt; 1997-1998
3.* A Critical Evaluation of Distributed Collaborative Computer Applications; Stefan Van de Velde; 1997-1998
4.* A Study of Communication Models for Mobile Multi Agent Systems; Karsten Verelst; 1998-1999
5. Combining Components using Control Flow Components; Philippe Demaecker; 1999-2000
6. Applicability of Mobility, a Case Study; Frederick Nyssens; 2000-2001
7.* Shagger: a Distributed File Sharing Community with Transparent User Management and Adaptive Replication; Wim Boffe; 2000-2001
8.** A Strategy to Generate a Scheduler for Time Critical Programs by means of Finite State Machines; Jessie Dedecker; 2000-2001
9. Applications for Code Mobility on Handheld Devices; Enzhen Luo; 2000-2001
10. Synchronisation & Communication in Mobile Multi Agents Systems: CSP Revisited; Jannes Pockele; 2000-2001
11.* Using a Declarative Language to support Concurrency Management in Mobile Multi Agent Systems; Kristof Van Buggenhout; 2000-2002
12. Quality of Service for Mobile Multi Agent Systems; Cedric Van Rykel; 2001-2002
13. Reflection by means of JIT compilation; Paul Henri van der Steichel; 2001-2002
14. Distributed Application Serving using Mobile Agents; Koen Bailleul; 2001-2002
15.* Transparent Fault Tolerance for Mobile Multi Agent Systems; Pieter Verheyden; 2001-2002
16. [Sensor only] Distributed Transaction Management - A Simulation; Weihai Pan; 12 Dec 2004; Computer Science Department, Universiyt Tromso
1. Modularizing Advanced Transaction Management; Tackling Tangled Aspect Code; Johan Fabry
2. Jessie Dedecker with his Phd on Pervasive Applications
Jury Member for CETRIL (Centre Européen de Transfert et de Recherche en Informatique Libre) in 2006.
Operating Systems: MSDOS, MS Windows (3.11, 95, 98, NT), Linux (Slackware, Debian, Gentoo), Solaris & SunOS
Programming Languages: Python, Jython, C, C++, Pascal, Prolog, Lisp, Scheme, Java (1.1.2, 1.1.8, 1.3.1, 1.4.0, 1.4.1), Pico, Borg; Libraries: QT, MFC,...
Middleware: OrbixWeb, Aglets, Voyager,...
Databases: MSAccess, MySQL, PostgressSQL...
Methodologies: UML (MSC's), OMT, Petri-Net Modelling, Room, Real-Time UML...
From November 1995 till December 1997 I was a board member of the student organization 'Infogroup'. This internal VUB organization was responsible for maintaining the computer rooms available to students, distributing course notes and maintaining a library of computer science books. I was active as system administrator and course manager. Key-points of this period:
The Programming Technology Lab of the VUB was responsible for the
organization of ECOOP'98, a well known conference on software engineering
by means of objects/aspects/components. I've been responsible for
the setup and maintenance of the visitors computer rooms.