Welcome

Welcome to my website. My name is Ralph Niels, and on this website you will find some information about my work and hobbies, my list of publications, and a selection of my photographs. As you will see, there are many clickable items on the website: most of them refer to other websites containing more information about a specific subject.

Work

Currently, I work as knowledge analyst at Be Informed, a company in the city of Apeldoorn. The description at the company's website says: "Be Informed helps organisations make their knowledge applicable and productive. Be Informed achieves this by providing a knowledge infrastructure for recording and managing this knowledge. This allows organisations to improve their service provision and reduce their costs, while improving their manoeuvrability and predictability.".

Until January, I was working as a PhD student at Radboud University Nijmegen from 2005 to early 2009. I'm still working there one day a week to finish my thesis, which is about the use of computers for handwriting analysis, primarily for forensic purposes. See 'Research' for more information about this.

Personal

I live in the village of Cuijk, where I have been living with my wife and two cats since 2005. I like to spend my time reading, watching films, preparing vegetarian meals, hiking, cycling, and traveling, but my favourite hobbies have their own paragraph, right under this one.

Music

Music has been my favourite hobby since as long as I can remember: I play some guitar, piano and saz, and try to produce some tones on other instruments as well. And of course, listening to music is something I like to do as well. Albums by The Beatles, DeVotchKa and the Dutch band Kayak take up a reasonable amount of space in my mp3-player, but I also like to listen to classical music and world music.

Photography

When I purchased a digital single-lens reflex camera in the beginning of 2008, the world of photography opened itself to me. Today, I try to carry my camera wherever I go, and polish my pictures in the 'digital studio'. Some of my pictures can be found in the 'Photography'-section.