Meet Our New ODISSEI Employees

In September three new ODISSEI employees have started at our partner organisations. Both the ODISSEI Social Data Analytics Team (OSDAT) at Utrecht University as well as the Portal Team at VU Amsterdam have expanded their teams.

The ODISSEI Social Data Analytics Team (OSDAT) welcomes Erik-Jan van Kesteren, at Utrecht University. Erik-Jan is an assistant professor in the Department of Methodology and Statistics. His background is in the social and behavioural sciences, and during his PhD, he has worked on extending linear models with latent variables (e.g., factor analysis, mediation analysis) for data such as genomics, brain images, and more. As part of OSDAT, Erik-Jan will help create accessible, open software and work on projects that advance the use of computational social science among the ODISSEI member organisations.

he Portal Team welcomes Vic Ding. Vic is an academic software developer at DANS for ODISSEI. His past work mainly involves programming for social and language-related studies. The latest project he participated in is ISEBEL, an intelligent search engine for folklore studies. He received his MSc degree from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and his undergraduate degree from Hogeschool inHolland.

The Portal Team also welcomes Ronald Siebes, at VU Amsterdam. Since receiving his PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the VU he has worked on many national and EU funded projects with a wide variety of domains like cultural heritage, data archiving, pharmacology, Big Data and more. Here he focussed on project management, research, and software development all related to Linked Data and in a lesser degree, machine learning. He has joined the ODISSEI team at VU Amsterdam and will work together with DANS on the Portal and the semantic enrichment part.