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Hi and welcome!

I’m Niels van Galen Last and thanks for visiting my site! I am a researcher at the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. Here I am working on my Master thesis project for my Computer Science program at the Delft University of Technology. Prior to my Master studies, I obtained a BSc in Technical Computer Science (with “cum laude” distinction).

My strong engineering interests can be traced back to my childhood, during which I played countless hours with Lego, building everything I could think of. I started programming when I was about 14 years old, in the Qbasic programming language, and over the years I got quite some experience with Java and C/C++. At the moment I am most happy to when, in my scarce leisure time, to program in the Ruby / Python programming languages, but mostly I am using Matlab and Java.

Research Interests

I’m particularly interested in the mathematics behind the theory of learning and mining very large data sets. Besides this, I’m also very fascinated by the field of Neuroscience. Especially, developing mathematical models of biological processes to get a more thorough understanding in the complex dynamical systems.

Artificial Intelligence, machine learning theory, reinforcement learning, evolutionary algorithms, mobile robotics and statistical pattern recognition.

Resume

My resume can be downloaded [here].