My Life

Born in Wilrijk on June 20th, 1946, I grew up in the Franck family and studied more than 21 years in Brasschaat, Gent and Leuven.
If you're interested, this timeline plots the main events of my life and these are the places where I've been living.
About my studies, despite my profound interest in linguistics and semantics, physical engineering became my final choice.
In 1976 I got a PhD on the morphology and crystallisation of the PTBA polymer.
In the meantime I married Hilde in 1972 and together we got this wonderful family.

May 1976 we moved to Petten in the Netherlands as I got employed at the JRC.
I spent many years on Materials Analysis but later on got involved in Informatics and ended my career in 2001 as Assistant to the Director.
Both Hilde and I are hobbyists, Hilde makes beautiful paintings, I'm an amateur photographer and our common passion was Argentine Tango.
Together we travelled a lot and visited lovely places, both with children and grandchildren and for Tango dancing.
Because I made so many photo reports on family reunions my nickname became "Opa Flits".
But in addition to that, I still have this profound interest in informatics which made me build loads of websites and getting involved in Genealogy.
And last but not least, I started to evaluate and use Artificial Intelligence. I used it to extend my study of the PTBA polymer.
Notwithstanding my generally positive feelings about AI, I felt the need to express a foresight in this Manifest.
Indeed, sometimes I'm worried about the future.