Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Since April 2017, I've been working in Search at Apple in San Francisco, focusing on multi-domain search, retrieval and ranking solutions used in Safari and Spotlight. As you can imagine, these applications are available in nearly every country/market on the planet and as far as the Apple ecosystem reaches in terms of device/platform availability. From November 2014 to April 2017, I worked as a Senior Data Scientist at Blueshift Labs, a San Francisco based startup in marketing automation. The data science team digs into very large volumes of user events, computes scores for individual users, and makes extremely personalized recommendations at scale. Before moving to the Bay Area, I worked at Yahoo! Labs in Barcelona, Spain, between September 2013 and November 2014 as a Research Engineer in the Web Mining group. There, I was doing data mining on huge (web-scale!) amounts of data from the Web. I obtained my PhD degree in Computer Science from Ghent University in 2013 on the topic of "Georeferencing Text Using Social Media". I've been working on mining geographical information from large datasets of social media content (up to 100 million training items), which are obtained by web crawling. From Oct 2006 to Apr 2013, I was a research scientist/doctoral candidate at the Internet Based Communication Networks and Services (IBCN) research group of Ghent University. Expertise (geographic) information retrieval, machine learning, hadoop, mapreduce, pig, python, (web scale) data mining, natural language processing, personalisation and recommendation
• Joined the company as the 2nd employee, building the entire data science stack and capabilities from scratch with very limited manpower. • Implemented and productionized scores and algorithms for computing rankings and recommendations over tens of millions of users on a daily basis. • Deployed advanced algorithms for specific customer use cases applying state-of-the-art text mining techniques and data structures. • Productionized predictive conversion scoring machine learning models for e-commerce. • Rapid prototyping and evaluation of new ideas and getting them to the market
Member of the Web Mining group of Francesco Bonchi. Data mining on an Internet scale. • Geo-related textual modelling/classification of a billion scale Flickr dataset using Hadoop-streaming. • Carrying out applied research on textual information mining • Time series extraction and modelling on 70+ TB of Twitter data. • EU FP7 Limosine project: large scale multilingual named entity, semantics and sentiment ex- traction from hundreds of millions of Yahoo! Answers Q&A and Wikipedia data. • Rapid prototyping of new algorithms for research projects
A non-profit organization to improve the working of the lifeguards and first aid employees in Koksijde-Oostduinkerke, Belgium and their social and cultural activities.
Head of a 12 person lifeguard team in Koksijde, responsible for safeguarding the people visiting a busy beach in Belgium as well as the watersporters of the adjacent yacht club. Highlighted competencies - emergency first response skills (in water and on land) - excellent communication and decision making skills under time critical conditions - transferring knowledge and skills via training to junior lifeguards (boat handling and navigation, currents, weather conditions, handling victims, ...)