SURF Story

As the Digital Transformation Manager at Graafschap College, Monique Mulders has a deeply rooted belief in collaboration. “Seeking each other out, strengthening one another, and moving forward together—that is my guiding principle,” she says. The sense of community that Eastern Netherlands is known for, the concept of naoberschap, seamlessly aligns with her vision: ‘Alone you go faster, but together you go further’.

Heritage. You cannot avoid it if you walk along the old Amsterdam canals to the historic building of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). There, we speak to Menno Rasch, director of Digital Infrastructure at the KNAW's Humanities Cluster. The main topic of conversation? That is, not surprisingly, the digitisation of our heritage.

At the presentation of the Dutch Data Prize 2024, xeno-canto, a website with recordings of nature sounds, was one of the three winners. Initiator Bob Planqué tells how he and his comrade Willem-Pier Vellinga made the website a figurehead of FAIRness.

Dr Melanie Rieback (46), co-founder and CEO of Radically Open Security, is known for her unique approach in cybersecurity. At the Open Source Leadership Summit on 13 December, she will share her views on non-profit entrepreneurship, transparency and the power of open source. Her life path proves that bold choices can lead to a whole new movement.

Read the SURF Story with Bob van Luijt, CEO of Weaviate, a rapidly growing and successful database company where - through an open source cloud platform - the focus is on developing AI-native applications.

How to create a believable virtual human? That’s the research focus of Zerrin Yumak, assistant professor at Utrecht University and director of the Motion Capture and Virtual Reality Lab. Zerrin is a keynote speaker at the XR Day on 3 July.

"I can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in language," says linguist Antal van den Bosch. "It is an instrument with wondrous properties. When I learnt a new language in high school, it gave me a kind of key to another world." Nowadays, he finds the magic in artificial intelligence.

Tenders tedious? Not for Monique Pellinkhof. She is senior procurement manager at GÉANT, the European association of research and education networks (NRENs). Currently, Pellinkhof is extremely busy with OCRE2024, the European tender for cloud services. "The international collaboration is hugely rewarding," she says.