I'm a born and raised Dutchy / recent American living in sunny California with his wife and children.
After doing my undergrad and masters in the Netherlands, I moved to Pittsburgh for graduate studies, and received my PhD at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. I was advised by Marek Druzdzel and was a member of dr. Druzdzel's group, the Decision Systems Laboratory. I have been actively involved in the development of GeNIe and SMILE, Bayesian Network software created by the lab, now available at Bayes Fusion. For my research, I worked on Bayesian networks and probabilistic graphical models. For my dissertation I worked on a project where I explored parallel inference and learning using the MapReduce framework, using Hadoop.
At Facebook/Meta I spent 9 years working as a data scientist and data science manager in Infrastructure. I've worked on making the apps faster and smoother, spent 5 years on Facebook's effort to improve and expand internet connectivity all around the world, having been directly involved in efforts improving internet connectivity for 400+ million people. Afterwards I supported data science teams in privacy, helping engineering teams build better systems, holding products accountable for fulfilling privacy commitments, and helping policy teams by standardizing parts of the process to assess the impact of incidents.
Now, at Clorox, I'm supporting the Company's Integrated Business Planning (IBP) effort with a team of AI/ML engineers that are building and maintaining our ML forecasting system, used to forecast shipments for our brands and businesses. In addition, I'm building a central AI/ML operations and services org to bring the experiences and lessons of our IBP ML efforts to other parts of the company.