Biography

Floor Verdenius was born in Heerenveen, Netherlands, on July 6, 1962. After secondary school, Atheneum B at the Thorbecke College in Groningen, he studied Software Engineering at the Technical College of Groningen, from which he graduated (B. Eng.) in 1987. He worked as a software engineer at a small software company (Grip Software), where he participated in the implementation of a decision support system for risk management. Simultaneously he studied Artificial Intelligence within the Linguistics Department of the University of Groningen, where he graduated (M. Sc.) in 1990. His thesis was on the application of connectionist models to represent basic cognitive processes.

In 1990 he worked as a researcher at the Research Institute on Knowledge Systems (RIKS) in Maastricht, where he developed and applied an algorithm for cost-effective induction of decision trees.

From 1991 to 1993 he worked as a consultant and researcher at Sentient Machine Research B.V. in Amsterdam. His main consultancy activities concerned the development of neural network applications for real world tasks, amongst others in marketing and sales, industrial quality control and finance. His research activities concentrated on a controllable development approach for neural network applications.

In 1993 he joined the AgroTechnological Research Institute (ATO-DLO) as a researcher on applying Machine Learning to agricultural problems. Here his work concentrated on the application process of inductive techniques. He has initiated and performed a survey on real world applications of inductive techniques in the Netherlands. Moreover, he works on an approach for developing learning solutions to real world problems. In this work, he collaborates with amongst others Maarten van Someren and Robert Engels.

His applied work resulted in a system for planning the treatment of agricultural produce based on decision trees, neural networks and constraint satisfaction. Also he worked on a case-based scheduling approach for resource allocation planning.

As internal project leader within ATO-DLO he had a major concern with the WaterCIME project, which aims at an open software framework for drinking water production and -distribution and waste water management. In this project, he was amongst others involved in the definition of a flexible modelling environment for scheduling waste water processes.

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