Arjen P. de Vries
Nijmegen, Gelderland, Netherlands
Summary
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SeniorArjen De Vries is a Full Professor of Information Retrieval with 25 years of experience bridging academic research and applied systems in information access, ranking, and dataspaces. Based in Nijmegen, he leads IR research and teaching at Radboud University while co-founding Spinque to bring research ideas into product and strategy. His work unifies information retrieval and database techniques, with practical contributions to systems like DuckDB where he improved compression and serialization to boost storage efficiency and data introspection. He has held professorial roles at TU Delft and leadership positions at CWI, applying IR foundations to multimedia, digital humanities, and biomedical data problems. Known for combining rigorous theory with hands-on engineering, he advises on both curriculum design and production-grade database internals. Beyond academia, he blends entrepreneurship and open-source impact to turn complex search problems into deployable solutions.
25 years of coding experience
Github Skills (15)
deserialization10
compression10
databases10
serializable10
c-language10
serializer10
cprogramming-language10
sql10
relational-databases10
sql-database10
compress10
database10
serialization10
embedded-database9
analytics8
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
duckdb/duckdb
Mar 2019 - Mar 2020
DuckDB is an analytical in-process SQL database management system
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:8 reviews, 11 commits, 11 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Arjen primarily focused on enhancing the `duckdb/duckdb` database system by implementing and modifying compression features. They added a new `BitpackingSegmentState` to return mode information, and modified the compression function to return segment information. Furthermore, the user implemented serialization and deserialization capabilities for the bitmode histogram and adapted function names for amalgamation. These changes likely improved the database's storage efficiency and the ability to provide information about the stored data.
duckdbsql-databasesqldatabaseolap
rubigdata/redbad-setup
May 2021 - Jun 2025
Redbad setup scripts
Contributions:1 PR, 110 pushes in 4 years 1 month
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