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email: wouter <at> addith.be
mobile: +39 345 355 1973
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Biography

Wouter Van den BroeckÂ first worked as an independent designer and was active in a non-profit organization calledÂ Amphion, which he founded together withÂ Dimitri Vermeiren.Â In 1996,Â Wouter co-founded Amphion Multi-Media, a new-media design studio in which he was active till 2000. He has since been operating under the name Addith.

In 1995 Wouter launched his first website called Kamers met Zicht (rooms with a view), later renamed to simply Amphion. This site was dedicated to contemporary non-mainstream culture in Antwerp, with a mild focus on electronic music, DJ culture and nightlife. It was initially hosted on Digitale Metropool Antwerpen, the then brand new online portal of the city of Antwerp.

Besides working on the cultural content projects hosted in the Amphion mother-site, Wouter also designed and developed various websites and CD/ROMs for cultural and corporate clients. He also collaborated on digital art projects, notably with Boy & Erik Stappaerts on the B&E Museum virtualization and CD/Rom project.

In 1999, Wouter left Amphion to pursue a new project for which he obtained the support of the MEDIA programme of the European Union. The objective of this project was to perform the initial R&D for a dynamic narrative media product called ComplekCity. This product was meant to be deployed on a computational medium, just like computer games. Unlike games however, the focus would be on narrative instead of competition and eye-hand coordination skills. The narrative engine was to operate on a dynamic semantic network in which all relevant relations in the narrative domain were encoded. This network was to be authored such that it formed a complex system on the Â«edge of chaosÂ». The idea was (and still is) that the narrative would emerge through the spectator’s interaction with this dynamic system.

After having worked on this project for almost two years, and having learned a lot, Wouter concluded he lacked the necessary programming skills and understanding of artificial intelligence to further pursue his dynamic narrative plans. After brief stints in Amsterdam and California, refining his Flash programming skills on a multi-user interaction/gaming framework, Wouter decided to enroll as a computer science student at the VUB university of Brussels.

Four years later he graduated summa cum laude and was invited to join the language team in the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris to engage in pre-doctoral research. This team builds on a pioneering line of research led by Luc Steels. It investigates the ways in which artificial agents can self-organize a language with natural-language like properties. This long-term project currently focusses on the emergence of grammar. Wouter’s contribution deals with the compositional meaning aspect of this problem. Over the course of two years, he developed a constraint-based system that can represent, interpret, conceptualize and learn compositional meaning. Although this system is primarily meant to be used in multi-agent experiments in emergent grammar, Wouter hopes to one day pursue some of the other potential applications he has in mind.

In April 2008, Wouter joined the Complex Networks unit of the Complex Systems Lagrange Laboratory at the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) in Torino, Italy (locate ISI in Google Earth.) This group routinely blends statistical physics and computer science in order to study the topology and behaviour of complex systems. Wouter’s contribution will be to further extend the use of contemporary internet technologies such as collaboration-oriented socio-technical systems for conducting internet-based experiments in e.g. social dynamics.

It goes without saying that Wouter’s experience with a.o. Flash-based multi-user platforms will be put to fine use in this new context. What he will be doing in Torino could thus be described as a next step in the reintegration (if ever one was needed) of his more recent activities as a scientific researcher, and his earlier activities as a new-media artist/developer.

Curriculum Vitae

Wouter’s Curriculum Vitae (57KB PDF) provides a more detailed overview of his professional experience, artistic accomplishments, education, press coverage, etc.

Publications

Modeling the critical care demand and antibiotics resources needed during the Fall 2009 wave of influenza A(H1N1) pandemic
D Balcan, V Colizza, AC Singer, C Chouaid, H Hu, B GonÃ§alves, P Bajardi, C Poletto, JJ Ramasco, N Perra, M Tizzoni, D Paolotti, W Van den Broeck, A-J Valleron and A Vespignani. PLoS Currents: Influenza. 2009 Dec 4, RRN1133.
Estimate of Novel Influenza A/H1N1 cases in Mexico at the early stage of the pandemic with a spatially structured epidemic model. V Colizza, A Vespignani, N Perra, C Poletto, B GonÃ§alves, H Hu, D Balcan, D Paolotti, W Van den Broeck, M Tizzoni, P Bajardi, JJ Ramasco. PLoS Currents: Influenza. 2009 Nov 11:RRN1129.
Modeling vaccination campaigns and the Fall/Winter 2009 activity of the new A(H1N1) influenza in the Northern Hemisphere. Paulo Bajardi, Chiara Poletto, Duygu Balcan, Hao Hu, Bruno Goncalves, Jose Ramasco, Daniela Paolotti, Nicola Perra, Michele Tizzoni, Wouter Van den Broeck, Vittoria Colizza and Alessandro Vespignani. Emerging Health Threats Journal 2009, 2:e11. doi: 10.3134/ehtj.09.011
Seasonal transmission potential and activity peaks of the new influenza A(H1N1): a Monte Carlo likelihood analysis based on human mobility. Duygu Balcan , Hao Hu , Bruno Goncalves , Paolo Bajardi , Chiara Poletto , Jose J Ramasco , Daniela Paolotti , Nicola Perra , Michele Tizzoni , Wouter Van den Broeck , Vittoria ColizzaÂ and Alessandro Vespignani. BMC Medicine 2009, 7:45.
Live Social Semantics. H. Alani, M. Szomsor, C. Cattuto, W. Van den Broeck, G. Correndo, A. Barrat. 8th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC2009.
High resolution dynamical mapping of social interactions with active RFID. Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, Vittoria Colizza, Jean-Francois Pinton, Wouter Van den Broeck, and Alessandro Vespignani. Informal publication, Nov 2008.
Constraint-based Compositional Semantics. Van den Broeck, Wouter. In Andrew D. M. Smith and Kenny Smith and Ramon Ferrer i Chancho, editor, The Evolution of Language: Evolang 7, 2008. World Scientific.
A constraint-based model of grounded compositional semantics. Van den Broeck, Wouter. In Luis Seabra Lopes, Tony Belpaeme, Stephen J. Cowley, editor, Language and Robots: Proceedings of the Symposium. 10-12 December 2007, Aveiro, Portugal, December 2007. Universidade de Aveiro.
Is Scale-Free a Realistic Topology for Evolving Biochemical Networks. H. Bersini, T. Lenaerts and W. Van den Broeck. In J.F.F. Mendes, S.N. Dorogovtsev, A. Povolotsky, F.V. Abreu and J.G. Oliveira, Science of Complex Networks. AIP Conference Proceedings 776:227-251, 2005.