About

whoami#

Hello 👋. My name is Jos Polfliet, and the reason I get up every day is to make the world more automated, more efficient, and more evidence-based. My specialty is in Machine and Deep Learning, with a special interest in Natural Language Processing.

My passion is in applying Artificial Intelligence by building A.I. powered products. That means I am committed and focused on doing useful things with A.I.

In the past and present, I had the opportunity to successfully help with, lead, or teach about building Machine Learning products at

  • CTO at Metamaze Intelligent Document Processing - building software to extract any type of information from any type of document type or e-mail (current)
  • Lecturer at Vlerick Business School - teaching an intensive two-week deepdive into using Natural Language Processing for building useful products (current)
  • Faktion - end responsible for all projects related to Machine Learning. Lead ML projects for clients like Bridgestone, Bank van Breda, GIS International, and many more under NDA. (April 2017-September 2020)
  • Chatlayer - natural language understanding, responsible for the NLP team. (April 2017 to February 2019)
  • SAS Belgium and Canada - implementing machine learning projects in natural language processing and predictive maintenance

My passion does not include contributing to “useless AI” like building Reinforcement Learning agents to play Atari games, nor does it include writing academic papers. Both create fascinating results regularly, but I have chosen to specialize in effectively applying those results to something that benefits us all more directly.

I am originally a mathematician, having studied at the great Mathematics department of Ghent University. I started programming by watching my father when I was about 8 years old.

git blame - Open source contributions#

pandas-profiling

I am the original creator of pandas-profiling.

Pandas-profiling generates profile reports from a pandas DataFrame. With >11k GitHub stars and >100k monthly downloads, pandas-profiling has been named one of the Top 20 ML packages by Google.

In May 2019, principal development was taken over by Simon Brugman. Since 2022, the company YData has taken over the responsibility.

Public speaking - International keynote speaker#

I am a regular speaker and panel member for Artificial Intelligence topics, including

  • Vlerick Digital Transformation Club
  • De Tijd’s Take The Lead program
  • Paperjam CEO Cocktail - article
  • Data Innovation Summit
  • ML Conference Munich
  • AI Congress London
  • Screenforce AI - old recording
  • AI4Business summit
  • Big Data Toronto
  • NTBC
  • ETIS
  • Data Innovation Summit
  • SAS Global Forum

Meetups are also a great way to connect with the community, and I’m happy to have spoken at

  • Belgian NLP meet-up
  • ML for Sensor data meet-up
  • School of A.I.
  • We Learn Machine Learning (WLML)

To give students some insight into how A.I. works in the real world, I have also given guest lectures at

  • Vlerick Business School
  • University of Waterloo
  • University of Ghent
  • Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)
  • Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
  • Schulich Business School
  • BeCode School of AI

Honors & Awards#

DataNews Tech Start-up of the year 2022

In 2022, Metamaze won the prestigious “Tech Start-up of the year” award by Datanews.

A.I. Scale-up of the year 2019

In 2019, Faktion won the “A.I. Scale-up of the year 2019” award at the Data Innovation Summit in Brussels.

inQbet hackathon - 1st place for AI Lab Assistant

Led the team that won first place (both jury’s price and public’s prize) in a competition of 20 AI companies.

We created an A.I. Lab Assistant that helped lab workers fill in their electronic lab notebooks.

Data Impact Challenge

In this competition, I worked on the winning submission to analyze social media data to predict the risk of suicide and mental health issues. The prize money ($10,000) was donated to two suicide prevention charities.

The organizer was Canada Health Infoway (Infoway), an independent, not-for-profit organization funded by the federal government to help improve the health of Canadians.

More info can be found here

Data Science Summit - Voted Best Keynote Award

The attendees of the Data Science Summit in Brussel voted my keynote presentation as the best among all keynotes. The subject was ‘Suicide prevention using Natural Language Processing on Social Media’

Contact#

To contact me

Random#

Outside of my passion for applying technology, I am interested in many topics. A couple of them are highlighted here.

Sustainability#

I have been living carbon neutral since 2020. I accomplish that by trying to reduce my carbon footprint by mostly eating plant-based food and living close to work (25 min bike ride). The (inevitable) carbon I do produce, I offset. Read more here about my efforts.

Reading#

I give stars to most book that I read, and even sometimes write short reviews with my thoughts. You can find recommendations on my Goodreads profile. I typically read

  • Non-fiction
  • Science Fiction, especially hard sci-fi, and space opera
  • Exceptionally great fiction books, historical or contemporary.

Sports#

I like doing sports. My regular sports are

  • Rock climbing (up to grade 6b) and alpine climbing (up to grade AD)
  • Running. You can follow me on Strava.
  • Yoga

Volunteering - Scouts (not active anymore)#

I joined SGV Mgr. Bermijn as a young “kapoen” when I was just six years old. Whether it was working on projects together, having passionate conversations, playing tiresome games in the local fields, or making fun of each other, I’ve never felt more at home in a place as in the Scouts. I strongly believe in its positive impact on its members, and therefore society as well. Following the natural progression of a scout’s career, I joined the team of leaders when I was 18 years old. After a couple of years, I wanted to help more to benefit the ongoing organization and joined the “groepsleiding”, which is a three-people management team. In this function, I was responsible for a small team of 30 volunteers who organise activities for about 200 members. This includes budget management, event planning, motivating and creative problem-solving.

Personal life <3#

Since August 2023, I’m married to Evelien. She’s the best partner I could ever imagine and I look forward to spending about 70 more years with her which will undoubtedly be the best years of my life.

TC2?#

Tau Ceti is one of the closest star systems believed to have planets in the goldilocks zone where liquid water is possible. That means Tau Ceti is one of the closest systems with the potential to harbor extra-terrestrial micro-bacterial life.

Tau Ceti Consulting is inspired by Tau Ceti Center (TC2), the capital of the universe in the magnificent Hyperion Cantos saga.