I must have been sixteen when I first read The Language Instinct, a marvelous book by Steven Pinker on how language works, how it is computed in the brain, and how it has evolved. I was immediately hooked to the question about the evolution of language, and more than sixteen years later, I found myself respectfully disagreeing with many of the things that Pinker has written. Moreover, I discovered that tackling one of science's oldest problems may have direct benefits for computer science, AI and linguistics. I enrolled myself at the University of Antwerp in 1998 to study linguistics, and soon realized that my questions about language could not be answered by traditional methodologies. So I majored in computational linguistics, where I became fascinated with new computational models and agent-based approaches for studying language evolution, which I then used for my Master's thesis. At the same time, I have also always been passionate about writing and education, so I took extracurricular writing courses and obtained my teacher's degree. Those three passions - language, writing and education - have been the running threads in my professional life ever since. After my studies, I spent two years working first as a journalist and then as a teacher. I was then offered the opportunity to pick up my research on language evolution at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris in 2005 in the context of the European FP6 ECAgents Project. At Sony CSL, I became one of the chief developers of Fluid Construction Grammar, an open source grammar formalism for open-ended deep language processing. I then co-authored the proposal for the European FP7 ALEAR project, for which I was hired in 2008 at the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Brussels. After obtaining my PhD from the University of Antwerp in that same year, I was hired as Researcher at Sony CSL Paris, where I am currently leading the language research.