Karim El Assal works as a research software engineer at TNO. He has a bachelor’s degree in Advanced Technology and a cum laude master’s degree in Computer Science, both received from the University of Twente. His focus during his master’s was on data science and software technology. Fueled by a passion for futuristic technologies, Karim is one of the core developers of the TNO SocialVR team. Part of his work is delivering well-structured solutions to encountered software challenges.

Simon N. B. Gunkel is a research and development scientist at TNO, the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research in The Hague. He received a master’s degree in computer science in 2012, both from the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea. His ongoing efforts in applied research covers a wide range of topics in multimedia, such as virtual reality communication, video conferencing, and quality of experience. In particular his interests are in the topic of web-based photo-realistic Social VR, involving aspects of the user, system, and network. This is also the topic of Simon’s ongoing PhD research in collaboration with the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), in Amsterdam (Netherlands). Part of his work includes leading the technical work package in the Horizon 2020 project VRTogether (http://vrtogether.eu/). Furthermore, Simon is currently holding a board position as Technology Manager in YEAR (Young European Associated Researchers).

Nanda van der Stap completed a Bachelor’s degree in Technical Medicine at the University of Twente in 2008. In 2011, she obtained her MSc. in Robotics and Imaging and continued with a PhD trajectory in the same area. Specifically, her PhD research comprised image-based navigation of flexible, robotized endoscopes. The research was carried out at the University of Twente and the Meander Medical Centre in Amersfoort. In 2015, her name was on the `Nerd 101′ list of most notable technologists in the Netherlands, as assembled by `Vrij Nederland’, an opinion magazine. Currently, Nanda holds a position as senior scientist at the Intelligent Imaging department of technological innovation company TNO.

Galit Rahim in a scientist innovator working at TNO. He has studied Video Game Development in Amsterdam and has expertise in Virtual and Augmented Reality. After his graduation in 2017 he joined TNO and now works at the Medialab of the Networks department on H2020: VRTogether and other Social VR projects.

In VRTogether he works on creating the virtual environments and make them compatible with current and new VR systems. He also does most of the TNO VR demos on conferences and meetings.

Hans Stokking started his career at KPN Research after graduating in Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management from Delft University of Technology. At KPN Hans has developed architectures for modern telephone networks, with a focus on integration with the Internet. Hans has continued this work at TNO and has adjusted his focus to triple play infrastructure and services, with a focus on interactive IPTV solutions. With the coming of relatively cheap but good VR headsets, Hans made the switch to developing solutions for networked VR including video.

On the technical side, the core expertise for Hans is at the session control layer: how to get services delivered across networks? In this, his expertise ranges from SIP, IMS and WebRTC to media synchronisation and orchestration, with more recent work focussing on VR related streaming technology. Hans’ focus has always been broad, focussing on subjects such as P2P networking, network probing, video coding and streaming, HBB-TV.

Hans is now a Senior Scientist at TNO, being the technical lead in projects mostly for industrial customers. Hans is (co-) author of quite a few popular and scientific papers and is (co-) inventor of over sixty patent applications.

Since 2018 Tom De Koninck works for TNO. He is responsible to bring applied research in the media networking domain to the market. The main work areas are Virtual Reality, video distribution and content detection/enrichment.

Tom has a long experience in the telecommunications industry, mainly as a product developer. He has been introducing consumer and business market products in Belgium for KPN Belgium and Belgacom International.

When he moved to live in the Netherlands, he continued to bring telecommunication products to the market for Vodafone and Liberty Global.

Tom is Director and Board Member of the VR Industry Forum (VR-IF.org)

Tom has an Engineering degree from the Free University of Brussels, Belgium.