SURF Story

Personal stories about the impact of technology

“It doesn’t have to be a big deal, just get started”

Ellen Mok (34) is the founder of Digitale Doetank, which helps organisations and public authorities to become digitally autonomous. On 27 October, she will deliver the opening keynote at the SURF conference ‘Inkoop Connect’. “IT is often tucked away in the operations department, but it’s a hyper-strategic issue. The technology you procure isn’t neutral.”

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"Our biggest challenge is making sure everyone can participate"

Aniel Ramawadh was the first in his family to go to university, thanks to an elementary school teacher who encouraged him to pursue vwo. Now he is a member of the executive board of Zadkine in Rotterdam. "I hope that with the help of digitization we can make education accessible to everyone," he says.

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Always looking ahead; what can we do with this technology

Inge Molenaar is an expert on artificial intelligence (AI) in education. She is director of the National Research Lab AI and, as associate professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, contributes to many studies on the applications of AI in education.

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Expanding horizons in Earth Observation

Serkan Girgin, SURF Research Support Champion 2022, built a data analysis platform at the University of Twente that provides researchers with easy access to compute resources and many open-source geographical analysis tools. "Compute resources should be a standard service at the university," he says.

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Step into the mind of a cyber criminal

How do you proceed when you want to steal someone's login details to access a secure system? That is one of the assignments of a workshop for VISTA College staff. Information security and privacy (IBP) coordinator Samantha Rodolf Lejeune creates awareness among her colleagues to reduce cyber risks.

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Democracy and the kingfisher

With his fine suits and bow ties, he is a familiar and colourful figure in the world of research support. Marlon Domingus is Data Protection Officer at Erasmus University Rotterdam and chairman of the SURF Taskforce Beyond Privacy Shield. A conversation about the big and the small things in life.

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Hybrid education with a foot pedal

"The layout of the university's teaching spaces was getting in my way more and more. My teaching style requires a lot of interaction and much less one-way traffic." Jasper van Winden, lecturer at Utrecht University, talks passionately about his initiatives to make teaching more interactive.

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"We are all in the same boat"

He always managed pretty well to keep an academic distance from his climate change research. Until about a year ago. Leo van Kampenhout became a father, and was shocked by the heatwave that engulfed the Netherlands last summer. "Since then, I started thinking more about how I can contribute to the solution as a scientist," he says.

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PRESTO: Peer assessment in relay format

An innovative and instructive form of education, but also a moral dilemma. This is how lecturer in Technical Public Administration Pieter Bots describes the learning relay he initially developed for his first-year students at TU Delft. "For some students it works extremely well, others call it 'unfair'."

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