Robert P.W. Duin studied applied physics at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. In 1978 he received the Ph.D. degree for a thesis on the accuracy of statistical pattern recognisers. In his research he included various aspects of the automatic interpretation of measurements, learning systems and classifiers. Between 1980 and 1990 he studied and developed hardware architectures and software configurations for interactive image analysis.  At this moment he is an associate professor of the Faculty of Applied Sciences of Delft University of Technology. His present research interests are in the design and evaluation of learning algorithms for pattern recognition applications. This includes neural network classifiers, support vector machines and classifier combining strategies. Recently he started to study alternative object representations for classification and became thereby interested in the use of relational methods for pattern recognition and in the possibilities to learn domain descriptions.