Join me on Thursday 30th May 2024 at 2 PM for the public defense of my doctoral thesis, on which I worked during the last five years and is titled…

You can find recent Biomedical NLP papers on my dedicated Mastodon account and now also in my brand new HuggingFace collection. Keep reading for more details!

This Monday (2021-07-12) marked the official start of the ADAM project, a collaboration between AZ Delta’s RADAR team and our own Internet and Data science Lab (IDLab, joint venture of UGent & imec).

Given I will be lead researcher on the Natural Language Understanding aspect of this project, I wanted to talk about it on my blog as well. Our shared goal in the ADAM project is to enable personalized medicine through deep patient understanding, which requires natural language processing of Dutch clinical notes.

In this technical report, the training procedure of our Transformer-based Dutch-to-English translation model will be outlined. This model was trained exclusively using freely available datasets, and yet achieves a performance level superior to the current state of the art in the domain.

We show this by comparing the precision and recall of MetaMap’s medical concepts extraction when executed on a set of Dutch clinical notes after translation to English, as well as by using more conventional quality metrics for translation models (BLEU…).

What happens when you like to use QWERTY keyboards, but also need to type French on a regular basis? Read below for more details!

In this (short) blog post I’ll explain what automatic hyphenation is, and how to enable this for a specific paragraph in word instead of the entire document.

Content warning. The story I’ll tell you here isn’t significant to the grand scheme of the universe but, hey, it happens to me, so it matters to me. If you don’t care about my life, maybe you shouldn’t care about this blog post. You got a fair warning :-)

It is surprising and annoying there is no easy way in html to get the accurate table row/column index of a cell if the table uses rowspan or colspan. This code does not reimplement the entire html spec’s algorithm because it is digusting but should work in all reasonable scenarios and the most common unreasonable scenarios:

What if 100% meant auto?

A coworker came to me last week asking if by chance I knew how to algorithmically detect the corners of a piece of paper whose picture was taken by a smartphone. Actually, this problems is best solved by detecting the edges of the paper, corners being the intersection of such lines…

The United States is not going to give up on guns. Not now, not anytime soon. Some guns owners are pretty vocal they won’t agree with any kind of regulation of their freedom to own guns, as they consider their gun an insurance which could save their life. That’s fair, maybe they are right after all. That doesn’t mean we non-gun-owners have to pay the price for it.

You know I’m not one of those people who usually mumble their disagreement in the dark side of the room. That’s a good thing; the world evolves in large part thanks to constructive feedback. When you’re such a kind of person, it is important to acknowledge when the world has changed and your feedback was taken into account. Today is such a day: I saw web performance talks from Google who made me real happy.

Time flows fast, and I was reminded a few days ago I have now been working at Microsoft for 6 months. To answer the questions of those who might want to know how I have been doing during this time, I decided to write this blog post.

If you follow me for some time, you might know already how much I like css custom properties. Not the variables syntax, which is arguably too verbose, but the power they bring to the table!

Jut replying here because it’s hard to comment on Twitter due to size limitation.

In this blog post, I’m trying to expose an idea I had a few days ago about how a temporary and supervised Grexit may actually help to stabilize and improve the economy of Greece in order to include Greece in the eurozone again in a few years.

In this series, I’ll explore some common web layouts and show how modern layout technologies allow you to achieve them using a semantic markup. In this first blog post, I’ll work on the facebook layout.

A message from someone who is sad to see cartoons being such misunderstood…

For some reason, Outlook 2013 doesn’t seem to like Outlook.com accounts. Sometimes, for no obvious reason, you’ll encounter sync issues like emails that are not shown anywhere but are still already marked as synced by Outlook 2013. If that seems familiar to you, I may have a workaround.

It’s been a while already that a vast majority of web designs have been, consciously or not, based on the concept of the grid layout. However, the formatting toolbox of the web did not, until recently, provide developers with the so-critical grid layout.

Now, we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and can’t continue waiting. That’s why I’ve been working on a piece of javascript you can add to any modern browser in order to add support for CSS Grids. Today, I’m releasing a first version to you, as part of larger css-polyfilling plans.

There’s has been recent discussion about the separation between content and presentation. The well known paradigm is simple: HTML is for content, for semantic information, and CSS is for presentation and layout.

The worldwide correlation between gun ownership and crime rate is visibly pointing toward a crime reduction as the gun ownership increases. So, I decided to investigate this further…

I am a huge fan of Windows 8, but I always acknowledged a few things were suboptimal in the way some things behaved. Let’s see if Windows 8.1 can do something to sort that out or not.

When you happen to have an integrated Intel HD graphics card, Age of Mythology refuses to let you change the screen resolution to anything useful, nor use 32 bits per pixel. This is a simple outdated auto-config problem you can fix very easily.

In this blog post, I’m continuing the work I started on the first leaked build of Windows 8.1 to include the new changes introduced in the latest leaked build of IE11 (namely build 9385 leaked a few days ago).

On the eve of HTML Web Components, and of stronger than ever Responsive Design requirements, the need for Element Media Queries is becoming very visible. This blog post will try to make a case for a JavaScript prollyfill and gives some background on why the :min-width pseudo-class is so difficult to implement.

Hi guys! I know some of you were requesting an RSS feed for my blog, so I decided to build one. For now, it’s not very discoverable and it’s still a ‘beta’ version with a few quirks, but it should be sufficient for the purpose it has to serve. You can get it from the following url:

Here are some of the new features (CSS/JavaScript) I noticed when working in the leaded IE11 build (please note that the build seems quite old to me, probably very near of the RTM version of IE10).

This small post might save time to some other people: it seems like while you can get the current NFC device when your app is launched as a share target, most of the features are actually disabled (you won’t be notified when an NFC tag comes in range and your attempts to post data to the tag will fail).

Yes, it's already done: after three amazing days, the Techdays have come to their end. It's thus time to recapitulate and conclude on what we got to see.

Hi there, this is just a small message to inform you I'm a proud owner of an Asus VivoTab RT (3G, 64Gb). So far I'm liking the experience, but I naturally misses my favorite dev tools, even if IE10 + CodeWriter do an acceptable job when working on HTML content.

This sunday, I presented the Extensible Web philosophy at FOSDEM. In case you weren’t able to attend, you may want to download the slides here. I’m going to update this blog post as soon a a video record is available.

On Windows 8 and with the rise of SSD devices, the storage space on the computer may prove scarce. One solution is to put your documents on a fast-enough SD Card. However, there’s a caveat: even if your format your SD card as NTFS drive, Windows will refuse to index the SD card (because it’s a removable device).

I see a lot of comments saying that screens sporting a resolution higher than Apple’s Retina one are not useful, because “you can’t see the pixels anyway”. In this article, I’ll explain why this belief is not true.

The Extensible Web Community Group is currently working on his first project: a polyfill code generator. The goal of the project is to generate a stub JavaScript code from some WebIDL definition. To ensure maximum compatibility, we need to follow the WebIDL type conversion rules: but how do we do this efficiently?

Back in early 2010, I made a lightening talk on how I thought a new kind of innovation process started to drive the web forward. Today, I think this model is becoming more and more the predominant model of evolution of web standards.

Brussels is the heart of Belgium (a French-, Dutch- and German-speaking country). In Brussels, more than 90% of the population is French-speaking. Yet, Brussels has become too small to host its population. An ever-growing amount of French-speaking people is forced to live in the peripheral region, called Flanders.

A few days ago, Microsoft introduced TypeScript. Many IT news websites defined TypeScript as a “Super Javascript” from Microsoft, but what is it really? Why was he crafted? What are Microsoft plans going forward?

I’m proposing to add ‘rpx’ aka the ‘Responsive Pixel Unit’ to later revisions of CSS Values and Units. It’s value is computed as follow: (1rem) / (the default font size settings of the browser).

These days, most JavaScript libraries perform data binding. Data binding means updating the UI automatically as a result of a model change using the Observer-Observee principle. Here’s my take on the data binding standardization.

These days, many people advocate for the use “image sets”. Meanwhile, image sets is just a way to put more burden on the developer by asking him to specify two image urls in his markup if he want to support high-resolution screens (phones, tablets, and high-end notebooks).

Some time ago, there has been a big PR ongoing by the people of the Web Performance WG to make sure we used requestAnimationFrame in our websites instead of setTimeout when it was available.

However, the latest drafts (which were implemented in IE10) introduced an undetectable breaking change from the currently published working draft, which can break your existing websites using the requestAnimationFrame function.

There’s no way to make designs responsive to ambient light variations in CSS today. This is strange, and I think it should change…

Among the few quantum laws that are well-known by the non-scientists, the Tunnel Effect is high-rated, maybe only surpassed by the Schrodinger’s Cat experience and the Wave-Particle duality.

However, few people really understand the phenomenon. In this article, I propose a simple yet effective way to understand the Tunnel Effect with no pre-required scientific knowledge.

We can divide the mails we receive in our mail box into multiple categories. Some are personal messages. Some, however, are automatically generated notifications. It’s therefore amazing no one (Apple, Microsoft, Google) actually integrated mails to their notification systems.

A while back I tweeted that users and authors, to the contrary of the popular belief, are less important than browser implementers and spec writers in standards committees. I really think it is the case, and I’ll care to explain why in this blog post.

For a long time, philosophers and theologians wonder if our conscience is immaterial. While this question is still open at the moment, many people believe our conscience isn’t anything more than the result of the many electrical processes happening in our brain.

Among those, Kenneth Hayworth (neurobiologist and engineer) is trying very hard to cartography the human brain. His ultimate goal? That someone create a digital program emulating his own brain before 2200 PCN…

When I was a child, I thought Philip Pullman was a very nice writer. Today, I can confirm he is. Recently, he inspired me an interesting discussion about Augmented Reality and Ambient Computing.

One of the recent discussions I had has brought to me the fact that open data without access to the database often is insufficient.

Recently, I had an interesting discussion with @LeaVerou, a very nice web developer living in Greece. She argued websites having a “default” gender in their registration form were offending, since that gender usually was male.

While everybody seems to be using WordPress right now, there’s no reason not consider making your own blogging platform. In this blog post, I’m sharing my experience on the creation of a blogging platform.

Many subjects are being discussed in the CSS Working Group. So many subjects, in fact, that you can't get involved in all of them. However, some are more critical to the future of the CSS language than others. And I truly believe that the current css-variables discussion is one of them.

It seems to me Zed is trying to get attention by mostly reporting problems whose solution already have been found and whose implementation in today’s browsers is a work in progress.