I am not an academic, and not an engineer by training. I come from the youth care sector — a field that may seem far removed from technology, but where questions about data, privacy, and digital dependency are anything but abstract.
In early 2025 I decided to start building. More than a year ago now — and I haven’t stopped since.
What started as curiosity about how AI actually works — not as a service from an American platform, but as something you run yourself, on your own hardware, in your own network — grew into a fully working technical foundation. Local language models, self-built infrastructure, distributed systems. Together with a small team, I am working on solutions — from information and advice to the hardware and infrastructure that makes it possible.
What drives me is a simple conviction: data ownership belongs to the person who generates the data. Not to a cloud platform somewhere far away. Europe has the legislation for this — the AI Act, the Data Act, the GDPR — but legislation alone changes nothing. Architectural choices do.
I am living through this transition in real time, whatever it turns out to mean. I explored that insight in The Great Return — an essay on why 2026 is the tipping point for European organisations that need to bring their AI and data back home. Read it here →
I am based in Leuven, and I notice that more and more people here are asking the same questions. If you are one of them — about what local AI means for your organisation, about European regulation, about what is technically possible — feel free to get in touch. I am happy to answer questions.