Paul Valckenaers

Paul Valckenaers is a senior researcher at UCLL and KU Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of “Design for the Unexpected” (Elsevier) revealing how to build IT systems that are knowledgeable about a world-of-interest without imposing constraints in the application domain. He became addicted to the BEAM after discovering how small the semantic gap between reality and software becomes when you switch to Erlang/OTP and Elixir. Paul has applied his insights to manufacturing, supply networks, logistics, fleet robotics, agriculture, smart traffic, smart grids and healthcare. His designs provide a collective-predicting situation awareness for real-world activities executing on resources. They disclose what is possible. Undesirable courses-of-action are counter-acted by predicting their (lack of) performance. Paul currently designs and implements embodied digital twins in STORY, a Horizon 2020 project on smart energy storage. These twins are digital co-workers that deliver in-depth interoperability by allowing to discover, observe and coordinate what is happening in energy installations.