Home > People > Gurp Jilles Van

Gurp Jilles Van

Research Engineer
Software Architecture & Runtimes

I joined the Nokia Research Center in December 2005. Since then, I have been working as a member of research staff. Since our last reorganization, I am a member of the Smart Spaces Lab at the Helsinki office.

Our team, headed by Christian Prehofer, inside this lab is called Application Environment for Smart Places and has as an umbrella mission to realize exactly that. Our vision here is that we want to improve the current practice where applications/prototypes for smart space applications have to be handcrafted due to a lack of suitable tools, frameworks and technologies. We use a very hands on approach and use web based technologies and tooling. The reason for this is that we strongly believe that smart spaces need to be an integral part of the Internet of the Future. Consequently, building on the existing internet seems like a good start.

I am currently involved in various activities:

  • Sensei - This is an EU FP7 integrated project on creating enabling technology for applications that use wireless sensor and actuator networks on a global scale. My work in this project is related to defining requirements and scenarios as well as working on the Sensei framework that will allow us to build applications for these scenarios.
  • Pressa - This is our teams internal project about enhancing public places such as Shopping Malls and airport terminals with indoor location based services. Our demo at the Internet of Things conference gave a sneak preview of what we are trying to do there.

Before Nokia

External Links

I have long maintained an internet presence at www.jillesvangurp.com where I maintain an overview of my publications; a personal blog and some photos.

Disclaimer: any material on my own site is unrelated to my activities inside Nokia (except for some publications). My personal opinions as stated on my personal blog are just that: personal opinions.

Research Interests

I have a broad range of interests. These topics below form a core of interests that are (currently) relevant in my work for the Nokia Research Center.

  • Ubiquitous Computing
  • Internet Security
  • Software Architecture
  • Software Variability Management
  • Software Engineering Methodology
  • Service Oriented Architectures

Technical Interests

I strongly believe that a researcher should be able to practice. In my case that means that I strive to be a competent software engineer and software architect. My skills/interests include, but are not limited to:

  • Java programming, particularly serverside. I have extensive experience with J2EE related technologies; many of the apache provided open source packages, including tomcat, muse, commons-*, axis. I've been using the language itself pretty much from the beginning. First as a teacher, then as a researcher and later as a software engineer. It has come a long way since 1995.
  • Web technology (HTML, CSS, Javascript). In my previous job I worked on a commercially available content management system.
  • Web service technology. The past few years have had me exposed to a wide range of web service software. Consequently I am quite well informed on the state of the art in this area.
  • Decentralized Social Networking and Identity. This is a pretty hot topic right now and I am following this with great interest.
  • Alternative programming languages. I consider Java to be a rather boring but best of breed (overall) OO language. Essentially most of the concepts it is based on were developed around the time I was born (1974). I'm well aware that OO is just one of the many ways of thinking about software development and am always interested in learning about and working with new languages. Things I'm particularly interested in right now are: aspect oriented programming and intentional programming.