Anthony Liekens (born 12 December 1975) is a Belgian computer scientist, biologist, inventor and educator.

Life and career

Anthony Liekens obtained his master's in computer science at

Vrije Universiteit Brussel The Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Dutch language, Dutch, ; lit. Free University of Brussels; abbreviated VUB) is a Dutch- and English-speaking research university in Brussels, Belgium. It has four campuses: Brussels Humanities, Science and Engine ...

in 2000 with extra curricular courses at the

University of Antwerp The University of Antwerp () is a major Belgian university located in the city of Antwerp. The official abbreviation is ''UAntwerp''. The University of Antwerp has about 20,000 students, which makes it the third-largest university in Flanders. ...

and obtained his PhD in biomedical technology at

Eindhoven University of Technology The Eindhoven University of Technology (), Abbreviation, abbr. TU/e, is a public university, public technical university in the Netherlands, situated in Eindhoven. In 2020–21, around 14,000 students were enrolled in its Bachelor of Science, BS ...

in 2005.

Projects

Hackerspace

Liekens operates the Open Garage hackerspace, residing as Belgian national radio's scientist where he shares educational knowledge with the community.

Vlaams Woordenboek (Flemish Dictionary)

In September 2007, Liekens launched Vlaams Woordenboek, a website with the aim of establishing an online Flemish dialectal dictionary.

Fri3d Camp

In 2014, Liekens launched ''Fri3d Camp'', a 2-yearly family-friendly hacker camp that is seen as the main Belgian hacker camp.

Corona Denktank

In March 2020, days before the

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In January 2020, the disease spread worldwide, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic. The symptoms of COVID‑19 can vary but often include fever ...

lockdown in Belgium, Liekens founded Corona Denktank, a civil movement that designed and built alternative solutions to lessen the suffering and to reduce the spread of the virus. Under his leadership, the movement grew to tens of thousands of contributors. Over its two months of operation, Corona Denktank initiated over 40 projects, including the distributed production of homemade facemasks, the launch of Praatbox, a barrier-free videoconferencing tool without accounts which quickly grew to 40 thousand users per day, collected and distributed 15 thousand laptops to school children. and collaborated together with king

Philippe of Belgium Philippe (born 15 April 1960) is King of the Belgians. He is the eldest child of King Albert II and Queen Paola. He succeeded his father upon the former's abdication for health reasons on 21 July 2013. He married Mathilde d'Udekem d'Acoz in 1 ...

to honor heroes of the pandemic.

Selected academic works

Most-cited papers: * 2011. Optimized filtering reduces the error rate in detecting genomic variants by short-read sequencing, ''

Nature biotechnology ''Nature Biotechnology'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio. The editor-in-chief is Barbara Cheifet who heads an in-house team of editors. The focus of the journal is biotechnology including research resu ...

''. According to GoogleScholar, this paper has been cited 237 times * 2011. BioGraph: unsupervised biomedical knowledge discovery via automated hypothesis generation, ''

Genome A genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding genes, other functional regions of the genome such as ...

Biology''. According to GoogleScholar, this paper has been cited 136 times * 2009. Molecular circuits for associative learning in single-celled organisms, ''

Journal of the Royal Society Interface The ''Journal of the Royal Society Interface'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering the interface between the life sciences and the physical sciences, including chemistry, engineering, materials science, mathematics, and physics. ...

''. According to GoogleScholar, this paper has been cited 132 times''''

Personal life

He is married and has 2 children.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Liekens, Anthony 1975 births Living people 21st-century Belgian biologists Belgian computer scientists