About
Thijs van As is a Computer Engineer with professional and non-professional experience in both Hardware and Software Engineering. He is employed by ASK Community Systems as a Technology Consultant/Software Engineer and is currently located in Indianapolis, IN.
I attended Delft University of Technology where I obtained a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master's degree in Computer Engineering. My research mainly focussed on (embedded) reconfigurable computer architectures.
For my Master's thesis I designed and implemented a reconfigurable and extensible VLIW microcessor: ρ-VEX. The project resulted in a working prototype and an open source hardware + software toolchain, as well as a paper that I presented at ICFPT 2008 in Taipei, Taiwan. Currently, research on the ρ-VEX architecture is still being conducted by different international universities.
While working at ASK Community Systems, I've been located in Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Albuquerque (NM) and Indianapolis (IN) for extended periods of time. I am providing support to local technology partners on how to integrate/extend their solutions with our ASK platform, which is an agent-based communications coordinator. In addition to that, I am working on our API for external developers, as well as optimizing our virtualized server infrastructure.
I am particularly interested in working with/on new architectural solutions that are able to change the landscape on the Internet, like cloud computing infrastructures, communication services and client-technologies like HTML5.
Developments on reconfigurable hardware are still catching my attention, and I am a strong believer that we will see many of these technologies at some point in mainstream products. However, I do also believe that the current state of computational technology provides enough 'room to breathe' for software architects to do some pretty wild things without being bothered by too many limits.
Over the years, I've done quite some hobby projects, both with reconfigurable hardware (FPGAs) and software. Some of them can be found on this website.
More about me can be found in my Curriculum Vitae.