Profile
- Name: Arthur Stobbelaar
- Occupation: Developer / Entrepeneur
- Experience: Web Development
History
The early years of my life I spend in Delft, The Netherlands. Born and raised in a bilingual household, I had a normal childhood and started exploring my passion for creating websites in the early days of <FONT> tags. The first website I created was The Download Network (TDN), a place where people could get information about applications and were provided with a link to download it. While popularity grew over time to an average of 300 people a day, the website died a slow death as my own interests shifted to different domains.
As my passion for films grew, I moved to Amsterdam and started a bachelors degree in Media and Culture, Film Studies, at the University of Amsterdam. In that period I had multiple leading functions, including finance chair of the Media Magazine Xi, webmaster of the Xi website and secretary of the technical team of student society D.E.R.M. Although my passion for film and film making never went away, the urge I had for film making faded as my web development hobby grew into a skill.
In 2005, I applied to the Camp Counselors USA program and was placed at a summer camp in Prescott, Arizona. The following five summers, I've worked there as a senior camp counselor, video specialist and co-administrator/IT-specialist. This is also the place where I picked up my English language skills, leadership training and sense of the American culture.
Almost every summer, I took the opportunity to travel throughout the United States and explored over 13 large American cities in 10 different states. This lead me to join an exchange program to San Francisco, California, where I studied at San Francisco State University. During that time, I was an officer for the International Education Exchange Council, where I was in charge of a 100-person skiing trip to Lake Tahoe, CA, and web developer of the IEEC website. Both tasks turned out to be a great success (a 20% profit was made for scholarships), which led to my recommendation for an internship at the Division of Information Technology at SFSU.
As part of the exchange program I started working full-time for the Division of Information Technology as part of the Webteam. Although I was offered a permanent job at San Francisco State, the road led me back to the University of Amsterdam where I started a masters degree in Information Science, Human Centered Multimedia.
Current
With the Master of Science title in sight, I'm mainly focused on completing my Master's thesis on tag annotations and user motivations on Flickr. This research has been approved and is underway. The main goal of the research is to discover the meaning that users put into tags they apply to photographic material, while trying to find a way to automate the annotation process and find correlation between usage and meaning.
I'm also focusing on further development of WorldMinder as an application to help translate complex relations and big sets of world data into human perceivable graphs. While finding free time and funding for this project is hard, I do feel passionate about the application and believe it can serve great purpose on a worldly scale.
Furthermore, I started this website to promote my services and offer my technical and interpersonal communication skills to companies in need of open expertise and focused insight on their company's technical operations. My main drive is to serve as an expert that is able to communicate on a very technical, yet economic scale, translating technical problems into business and human language.