Professional Experience
Led development of LLMs for all 24 EU languages and released BübleLM-2B with HU Berlin. Previously created RobBERT, achieving SOTA performance for Dutch and garnering 25k+ monthly downloads. Lecturer for the NLP course at KULAK. NLP Expert for the EU AI Office and member of the KU Leuven GenAI committee.
PhD on fairer foundation models at the DTAI lab with Prof. Luc De Raedt and Prof. Bettina Berendt. Research intern on LLM toxicity reduction (AurA) at Apple MLR. Experience with major language models (Falcon, OPT, MPT) and research visits to MilaNLP and Weizenbaum Institute.
Education
Thesis on bias mitigation in large language models, supervised by Prof. Luc De Raedt and Prof. Bettina Berendt.
Focus on machine learning and computer vision. Thesis on obstacle detection with Prof. Johan Suykens and CNH Industrial.
Focus on distributed systems. Thesis on failure detection in stream processing at Nokia Bell Labs.
Academic Service & Impact
Academic Community
Organized the LLM session at the Flanders AI Research Day. Received Best Student Paper at FAccT 2022. Previously lecturer of NLP (2024) and TA for AI fundamentals courses (2019-2024).
Active in the research community as program committee member and reviewer for top-tier conferences.
Venues: FAccT (2020, 2022), ACL (2023), IJCAI (2022, 2023), ECML-PKDD, ARR (2022-present)
Advisory & Supervision
Contributing expertise as NLP Expert for the EU AI Office's code of practice and member of the KU Leuven GenAI expert committee. Industry collaborations with VDAB and language learning centers.
Currently (co-)supervising Thomas Bauwens on tokenization and cross-lingual transfer for his PhD. Previously supervised 15+ master's theses, leading to an ICCC'21 publication and collaborations with TU Berlin and Acapela on resume writing and prosody prediction.