Curriculum Vitae

Personalia

Family name:	Kootstra
First name:	Gert
Postal address:	CSC - CAS/CVAP KTH SE-100 44 Stockholm Sweden
Visiting address:	Teknikringen 14, room 713 KTH SE-100 44 Stockholm Sweden
Telephone (work):	+46 (0)8 790 6792
Date of Birth	23 December 1978
Place of Birth	Bovensmilde, The Netherlands
Nationality	Dutch

Work Experience

[2009-current]
Post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Autonomous Systems of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. The research focusses on visual attention and segmentation for robotic scene understanding. More information can be found here.

[2005-2009]
Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen. Title of dissertation: "Visual Attention and Active Vision: from natural to artificial systems". More info about the research can be found here

[2002-2005]
Junior Lecturer at the Artificial Intelligence Institute of the University of Groningen. An overview of the teaching and organzing activities.

[begin 2002]
Internship at the AI-lab of Rolf Pfeifer at the University of Zurich. Graduation research on bio-robotics with resulting M.Sc. thesis "Selection of Landmarks for Visual Landmark Navigation on a Mobile Robot".

[2001-2002]
Webdesigner for ICT@NN.

[1998-2001]
Student-assistent. Teaching courses about Microsoft Office, Windows and webdesign.

[1997-1998]
Editor for student magazines: "de Brainstorm" of student club CoVeR at AI Groningen, and "de Periodiek" of student club FMF at CS, Groningen.

[summers '97-'00]
Tour manager and sail/mountainbike instructor for summer holidays in Croatia and Italy. I worked for Reitsema Reizen BV, Labyrinth, and Cirkel Holland Reizen. Groups aged from children to adults. Activities: management and coordination, sail instruction, mountainbike trips, etc.

[1998-2004]
Soccer trainer. Training 8-10 year olds at Be Quick Haren from 1998-2000, and seniors (18-15) at The Knickerbockers, Groningen from 2000-2004.

[2000-2002]
Organizing soccer competitions/tournaments and a music festival.

Education

[2005-2009]
Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen. Title of dissertation: "Visual Attention and Active Vision: from natural to artificial systems". More info about the research can be found here

[1998-2002]
Artificial Intelligence (Cognitive Science and Engineering) at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Title of M.Sc. thesis: "Selection of Landmarks for Visual Landmark Navigation on a Mobile Robot".

[1997-1998]
Propedeuse Computer Science at the University of Groningen.

[1991-1997]
Atheneum at "Vincent Van Gogh College", Assen, Netherlands. Subjects: Dutch, English, Mathematics A, Mathematics B, Physics, Chemistry, Economics

Scientific Interests

Robotics and Autonomous Systems

Active Perception

Visual Attention (Top-Down and Bottom-Up)

Object detection and segmentation

Prediciting Eye Movements

Saliency Models

Figure-Ground Segregation

Active Object Recognition

Visual Robotic Navigation

Monte Carlo Localization / Particle Filters

Publications

A list of publications can be found here.

Invited Talks

A list of invited talks can be found here.

Teaching and Organization

Information about teaching activities and organized summer schools, symposia, and events can be found here.

Leisure Interests

Making music: Playing guitar and percussion.

Listening to music: All kinds, but mostly alternative pop and singer-song-writers (e.g., Beatles, Radiohead, Elliott Smith, Kings of Convenience, ...)

Sports: Ultimate frisbee, soccer, biking, and hiking.