Curriculum Vitae

Pieter Noyens
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Orient. Focus.
Contents

1 Vision 1

2 Education 4

3 Projects 8

4 Working experience 12

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Chapter 1

Vision

Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. (Descartes, 1641)

What I am is what I want to be. And what I want to be, is what I
dream, is what I want. So I am what I dream? Yes. I think therefore I
dream. This may seem a little bit too farfetched, but in fact it is one of the
most important lessons Ive learned throughout my life. I can and should
not neglect what I dream, as it is who I am. Dreams should be analyzed
carefully though; its only the right conclusions leading to the right direction
in life.
For 23 years now, I have been analyzing my dreams. I must say that this
seems to be going into the rapids the last time, but I dont consider it to be
a bad thing. I love to explore myself and discover new clues in solving the
puzzle of identity. While thinking about this term, I also like to consider
what is not identity. It deserves a lot of attention and I think many people
do not fear the consequences of losing it as much as I do. The one thing
that interests me most in this regard is the effect of our online presence and
lingering in the fields of social media and news feeds. We want to store and
share everything, while in the meantime Im convinced we dont.
This is the vision that strikes me in the face harder and harder every day.
I realized that the current model of big centralized datacenters managed

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CHAPTER 1. VISION 2

and analyzed by big companies that sell out their users as the actual product
while hiding as much as possible crucial parts of their privacy policies is
against all of my fundamental values of self-sovereignty. It is frustrating
to see these are in fact the only major media of internet communication
available today. But its not only privacy that Im worried about.
It has always been an ambition to use my IT and scientific knowledge and
experience to improve the process of internet communication while following
my own vision of digital communication. The Internet should be in function
of peoples lives, and truly operate in that one direction. I think many
people are not even aware of it happening the other way around and the
consequences of a medium like Facebook or any other social network, which
for me seem to trigger people to move towards a life in function of the
internet, without them actually realizing it. Several examples immediately
come to mind. I see people within my entourage living the perfect life online
while being a complete disaster offline. I see people being frustrated by some
good intentioned reaction from a good friend which happens to mismatch
their perfect profile. No matter the cost, they want it to be perfect and keep
it that way. They are disillusioned by the radical need of recognition. Real
life relations collapse because of the most piddling affairs and people perish
under the pressure of constantly being watched.
My internet spirit shouts less is more. I dont want to have an archive
of pictures or texts or videos hanging out here or there, under the misusing
control of someone else than me. This not only relates to privacy though,
but also on the effect it has on myself and my surrounding. Worrying about
data is just something I dont want to do. Worrying about the storage place
of that funny picture from holiday X is just something I dont want to do.
An archive of dummy personal data is something nobody really wants. All
I have to remember is in my head or in knowledge shared on the internet.
Databases for me are only relevant to store and share knowledge, not to
CHAPTER 1. VISION 3

pile up online luggage weighing on my back. We are not independent of

information in the cloud. I dont want to be followed by my own data.
There is only one relevant profile and I always have that with me.
With this, I want to finish at the point we started. Identity. And more-
over, yes, I do prefer a cloudless sky.
Chapter 2

Education

I followed secondary education at the WICO Campus Sint-Hubertus, situ-

ated in Neerpelt, Belgium. As a Belgian 12-year-old boy, I started with a
program filled with courses on Latin and the regular topics. After the first
year, I opted for a trajectory including ancient Greek language but changed
this direction at the beginning of my last two years. I returned to a tra-
jectory of Latin language combined with additional hours of sciences and
mathematics.
After these 6 years in secondary school, I went to the city of Leuven to
study biochemistry and biotechnology at the University of Leuven. I got
my bachelors degree in 2014 and choose to go in a more computational
direction; already in my second year of college I decided to do a minor in
informatics to prepare for this. The courses I followed these years, including
their identifiers, are given in the list below.

Bio-organic Chemistry (G0N08A)

Cell Biology and Biochemistry (G0N04C)

Analytical Biochemistry (G0O51C)

Microbiology (G0N16C)

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CHAPTER 2. EDUCATION 5

Molecular Biology (G0O53C)

Natural Products Chemistry (G0O55A)

Integrated Laboratory Sessions (G0O57C)

Dynamic Biochemistry (G0N20E)

Genetic Engineering (I0O11A)

Immunological Biotechnology (G0P77B)

Bioinformatics and Modelling (G0O59B)

Spectroscopy of Biomolecules (G0O58C)

Mathematics I (G0N02B)

Fundamentals for Chemistry (G0N01C)

Structural and Physiological Biology (G0W63A)

Mathematics II (G0O17D)

Genetics (G0N12B)

Safety and Laboratory Practice (G0O26B)

General Physics I (G0N03B)

General Physics II (G0N13B)

Statistics and Data-Analysis (G0N11C)

Chemical Thermodynamics (G0O31B)

Science Communication (G0N14A)

Philosophy (G0Q80A)

Perspectives on Religion and Meaning (A08C7A)

CHAPTER 2. EDUCATION 6

Fundamentals for Computer Science (G0P79A)

Object Oriented Programming (H01P1A)

Data Base Systems (H01O9A)

Principles of Computer Programming (G0N28A)

Artificial Intelligence (H06U1A)

From 2014 till january 2017, I did my masters in bioinformatics at the

faculty of bioscience engineering. These years focused on statistical analysis
of big biological data, programming mostly Python, R and MATLAB with
some Bash scripting and applying these skills on biological research ques-
tions. For example, sophisticated dynamic programming algorithms can be
applied on genetic sequences in order to get them aligned and reveal hidden
patterns of evolution and conservation. These conserved sequential domains
can then be linked to important parts of genes with possible medical or
technological relevance. Strong statistical analysis on these sequences can
also be performed to discover new QTLs (Quantitative Trait Locus) giving
rise to all kinds of phenotypes. Computational modeling of protein three-
dimensional structure is another interesting topic in bioinformatics, which
constitutes a major subject in my masters thesis. The courses I followed
these last two years in college can be wrapped up as follows.

Toxicology (E07U2A)

Practical Computing for Bioinformatics (I0U30A)

Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computing (H02D1A)

Bioinorganic Chemistry (G0Y55A)

Dynamic Biochemistry II (G0G74A)

Capita Selecta of Molecular Oncobiology (E08V8A)

CHAPTER 2. EDUCATION 7

Molecular Interactions: Theories and Methods (I0D43A)

Bio-Molecular Model Building (I0D44A)

Model Organisms (I0D45A)

Dynamical Systems (I0D48A)

Management of Large-Scale Omics Data (I0U19A)

Omics Techniques and Data Analysis (I0U28A)

Statistical Methods for Bioinformatics (I0U31A)

Machine Learning and Inductive Inference (H02C1A)

Support Vector Machines: Methods and Applications (H02D3A)

Bayesian Modelling for Biological Data Analysis (I0D50A)

Evolutionary and Quantitative Genetics (I0D53A)

Applied Multivariate Statistical Analysis (I0P16B)

Integrated Bioinformatics Project (I0U20A)

Comparative and Regulatory Genomics (I0U29A)

In the meantime, I also practised to play the saxophone for more than
12 years and Im happy to say this actually turned out to be quite fun.
Im currently also looking for opportunities in this regard to form all kinds
of musical formations. The interested reader can hear me playing on my
SoundCloud and YouTube accounts.
Chapter 3

Projects

During my years of study, I made several papers that are too numerous to
sum up here, going from finding clues of the Big 5 personality traits in a
Facebook dataset over solving the Traveling Salesman Problem with genetic
algorithms to examining the anti-cancer characteristics of cisplatinum and
relative compounds. The major one being of course my masters dissertation,
which can be found freely available on Scribd. In this work I propose a
fully automated and less biased evolutionary strategy to design and optimize
a binding site for random substrate molecules without known natural binding
pocket. Based on an efficient genetic algorithm dubbed FIGARO (a Fast
and Interpopulational Genetic Algorithm for Receptor Optimization), we
show that this strategy can be a promising new approach in finding valuable
protein structures that can be useful either as starting points in the task of
artificial enzyme design, or may also be used as general optimized receptors
in important domains of research like the antibody treatment of cancer.
A custom logo was designed for this work, which is illustrated in figure
3.1.
Next to this, I also like to play with ideas that come to mind now and
then. These are mostly based on my vision outlined in chapter 1. A few
of them keeping me busy these days relate to distributed private storage,

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CHAPTER 3. PROJECTS 9

Figure 3.1: FIGARO a Fast and Interpopulational Genetic Algorithm for

Receptor Optimization.

Figure 3.2: Bandits in the Woods.

CHAPTER 3. PROJECTS 10

beer brewing optimization and some photography and writing. Some of my

photographs were added to this section.
CHAPTER 3. PROJECTS 11

Figure 3.3: Orient.

Chapter 4

Working experience

Student worker at Delhaize, 2011-2014 As a general working aid in

the AD Delhaize supermarket located in Bocholt (Belgium), I helped
with all kinds of tasks going from client administration and shop main-
tenance to cashier functions.

Student worker at ENTHiON, 2014-2015 This job required me to sell

ice cream and sigarettes on some of the largest music festivals as well
as other events all around Belgium.

Speech-to-text reporter at University of Leuven, 2015-2016 During

classes of a student with hearing disabilities, I had to write down in
real time all information being said. As this student followed courses
in biomedical laboratory practice and I had a background in biochem-
istry, this was also causing me to rehearse the stuff I learned. A win-
win situation.

Software Developer at Accenture, 2017-present Started off with a ma-

jor Java training, leading to the Oracle Certified Programmer I certifi-
cate. Currently working on innovative projects exploring the wonder-
ful world of Blockchain, juggling around with some JavaScript, Node.js
and Solidity magic.

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