Ben Steemers

During my final time at Joblift, my wife started a paper conservation company. The early stages of setting up a company are inevitably met with work that takes time and skill but need to happen once in order to get the company going. We decided to team-up for this initial stage until the company was running smoothly. This included administrative work, realizing a website, approaching initial customers and setting up the workshop.

At Joblift I transitioned to data science in a brand-new team setting-up data science capabilities from scratch. This proved to be a fast-track initiation in all facets of data science where end-to-end ownership was a must. Project included: - Developing an AutoML system that creates text classification models based on limited multilingual examples - Deploy an open-source Large Language Model at speed and scale - Improve recommendation engine using custom semantic similarity scores

As a PhD student I enjoyed end-to-end ownership of my project, including planning and executing scientific experiments followed by data analysis and presenting results to audiences with varying topical knowledge. I exited this PhD program prematurely due to a lack of confidence in the scientific community within my particular field. Though it was with a heavy heart that I left human biology behind, I find data science to be as, if not more, satisfying.