Anthony Liekens (born 12 December 1975) is a Belgian informaticist, biologist, inventor and educator.

Life and career

Anthony Liekens obtained his master's in computer science at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2000 with extra curricular courses at the University of Antwerp and obtained his PhD in biomedical technology at Eindhoven University of Technology in 2005.^[2]

In 2005 his work on photography from Saturn's moon Titan was published.^{[3][4][5][6][7][8]}

Liekens operates the Open Garage hackerspace, residing as Belgian national radio's scientist where he shares educational knowledge with the community.^[9][10][11]

Vlaams Woordenboek

In September 2007, Liekens launched Vlaams Woordenboek,^[12] a website with the aim of establishing an online Flemish dialectal dictionary. However, he looked for a "buyer" in 2021, seeing that he was busy with his professional career.^[13]

Fri3d Camp

In 2014, Liekens organized Fri3d Camp. Since then, Fri3d Camp has been a 2-yearly family-friendly^{[citation needed]} hacker camp that is seen as the main Belgian hacker camp, next to peers such as Chaos Communication Camp in Germany and Electromagnetic Field (festival) in the UK.^[14][15][16]

Corona Denktank

In March 2020, days before the COVID-19 lockdown in Belgium, Liekens founded Corona Denktank, a civil movement that designed and built alternative solutions to lessen the suffering and to reduce the spread of the virus.^[17][18] Under his leadership, the movement grew to tens of thousands of contributors. After two weeks, Liekens restructured the citizen movement to become a flat organization with a do-ocracy governance model.

Over its two months of operation, Corona Denktank initiated over 40 projects, most of which spun off into their own independent projects, the most notable include:

• Corona Denktank instigated the distributed production of an estimated 1.8 million homemade facemasks^[19] and 50 thousand protective face caps. The United Nations granted a Sustainable Development Goals Solidarity Action Award for the design of transparent facemasks for those who are deaf and hard of hearing.^[20][21]

• In March 2020, Corona Denktank launched Praatbox, a barrier-free videoconferencing tool without accounts which quickly grew to 40 thousand users per day, mainly introducing school children and elderly people to videoconferencing.^[22] The Flemish Youth Council recommended Praatbox as the safest standard for videoconferencing for use in juvenile court and social youth services.^[23]

• In collaboration with Digital For Youth, Corona Denktank collected and distributed 15 thousand laptops to school children.^[24]

• Corona Denktank initiated the design of DIY respirators^[25] and multi-patient ventilators.^[26]

• Corona Denktank translated and published official health guidelines into Belgium's 3 official languages and 20 other languages.

• With HoopDoetLeven, Corona Denktank collaborated with king Philippe of Belgium to honor heroes of the pandemic.^[27]

Selected academic works

Most-cited papers:^[28][29]

• 2011. Optimized filtering reduces the error rate in detecting genomic variants by short-read sequencing, Nature biotechnology.^[30] According to GoogleScholar, this paper has been cited 237 times^[29]
• 2011. BioGraph: unsupervised biomedical knowledge discovery via automated hypothesis generation, Genome Biology.^[31] According to GoogleScholar, this paper has been cited 136 times^[29]
• 2009. Molecular circuits for associative learning in single-celled organisms,^[32] Journal of the Royal Society Interface. According to GoogleScholar, this paper has been cited 132 times^[29]

Personal life

He is married and has 2 children.^{[citation needed]}