In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the Netherlands has become a hub of innovation. Within this ecosystem, an exceptional group of women is making significant strides.
These women showcase the Netherlands’ diverse expertise in AI.
From groundbreaking research to innovative applications, these professionals are at the forefront of advancing AI technology, and their contributions are anticipated to have a lasting impact on the industry.
As we approach 2024, it is crucial to cast the spotlight on the Netherlands-based Women in AI who are poised to play significant roles in shaping the course of this cutting-edge field.
Take a look!
Noelle Cicilia
Co-founder of Brush
Noelle Cicilia, the co-founder and managing partner at Brush AI, has been actively contributing to the field of responsible AI consultancy.
Brush AI, an AI consultancy firm associated with Inkubis and the Cronos group, emphasises the ethical application of AI and ML technologies to help companies extract value from their data.
Apart from her role at Brush AI, Noelle serves at Sigma Squared Society, a non-profit
organisation and global community that gathers ambitious young founders recognised for their impact-driven initiatives and ability to revolutionise industries.
As a Graduate Intern at Bright Cape, Noelle researched attribute-enhanced matrix factorisation for recommender systems, specifically on data-driven persona creation.
Before her current ventures, Noelle gained experience as a Student Research Assistant at Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, where she provided support in constructing a literature review on Cloud and High-Performance Computing system bugs.
She also served as a Growth Hacker at Leapforce, a growth hacking and digital marketing startup, and as a Barista at Starbucks.
Noelle pursued her academic at Eindhoven University of Technology, where she completed a Master’s degree in Data Science and Entrepreneurship. She is enrolled in an Engineering Doctorate (EngD) program at the same university, focusing on operationalising algorithmic fairness in practice.
Cynthia Liem
Associate Professor at TU Delft
Cynthia C. S. Liem is an Associate Professor at the Multimedia Computing Group of Delft University of Technology.
She completed her Computer Science degrees (BSc, MSc, PhD) at Delft University of Technology and Classical Piano Performance degrees (BMus, MMus) at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.
Her professional journey includes substantial research and software engineering roles at Bell Labs Europe Netherlands, Philips Research, Google UK, and Google Inc. in Mountain View, USA.
Liem’s current research interests involve pushing a multimedia paradigm to digital music analysis and focusing on exploiting multiple sources of music information to extract affective, subjective, and artistic aspects from it.
As a driving force behind the acquisition of the FP7 PHENICX project, she is serving as Dissemination Coordinator, work package leader, and active researcher during the project. She also currently leads the Social Zap subproject of the Dutch national FES COMMIT SEALINCMedia project.
She received several prestigious awards as a computer scientist, including the Lucent Global Science and Google Anita Borg Europe Memorial scholarships and the Google European Doctoral Fellowship in Multimedia.
Karin van Leersum
Postdoctoral researcher
Karin van Leersum is a postdoctoral researcher working on artificial intelligence (AI), particularly AI and ageing, and AI in healthcare.
While the project is still in its developmental stages, she is actively investigating the diverse perspectives related to explainable AI.
The research also dives into the relationship between AI and evolving practices in health, caregiving, and social connectivity during ageing. Collaboration with various healthcare and older adult community stakeholders is integral to this project.
In earlier projects, she has been researching citizen science methodologies and investigating how various groups of citizens integrate innovations and new forms of information and data into their daily lives.
As part of citizen sciences projects, she collaborated with older adults with a migration background and patients with Type 2 diabetes mellitus, among others.
During her PhD, she, jointly with clients in long-term care, developed and evaluated a tool: “What matters to me ” (www.watikbelangrijkvind.nl). This tool assists clients in long-term care to articulate their preferences and needs in their lives.
Muriël Serrurier Schepper
Senior data analytics in Artificial Intelligence
Schepper is a senior program/project manager specialising in data, analytics, and artificial intelligence.
With a talent for combining data, technology, and people, Schepper likes to develop internal and external teamwork.
Having worked with multinational teams, Schepper has gained varied experience across multiple industries and company sizes.
She considers herself a dynamic, persuasive, results-driven individual who can build bridges, work well in teams, communicate effectively, and have an open mind and an international perspective. She is a self-starter with a passion for data and Italy.
Schepper pursued a Master’s in Industrial and Organisational Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) from 1995 to 2000, specialising in Organisational Change.
She further enhanced her academic portfolio at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2007, where they completed a post-academic Strategic Account Management (ISAM) program in 2007.
Additionally, Schepper studied at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, focusing on strategy development, strategy implementation, and modules in marketing and finance from 2004 to 2005.
Ksenia Belkina
Founder and CEO of Cardiomo Care
Belikina is the founder and CEO of Cardiomo Care, a company that develops miniature wearable patches for continuous, real-time, remote health monitoring to detect and predict medically actionable CVD events.
Last year, she co-founded Lizz Health in the Arnhem-Nijmegen Region, cementing her position in the startup and healthcare domains.
In addition to her entrepreneurial experiences, Belikina serves as a Partner at Health Valley. Before her ventures in the healthcare industry, Belikina held the CEO role at Alternative Charitable Foundation in Kyiv City, Ukraine.
Belikina earned her Master’s degree in International Relations from V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, followed by a Master’s in Psychology focusing on practical psychology from the National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine.
She completed a Market Access & Reimbursement Program at PLNT Leiden. Additionally, she acquired a Medical Devices – Quality Management Systems – ISO 13485:16 certificate and implemented the MDR for CE Marking through a course at Radboud University.
Anastasia Borovykh
Assistant Professor at Imperial College London
Anastasia is currently an Assistant Professor at Imperial College London, where she has been leading a research lab focused on designing efficient and robust artificial intelligence algorithms with applications in neuroscience.
In addition to her role at Imperial College London, she is an AI Researcher at I-X and a co-founder at SKIAlabs.
As the co-founder, she led a team in developing software for optimising city waste collection. The solution gained recognition and is utilised by the municipality of Amsterdam, backed by the EIT Urban Mobility accelerator.
Before her entrepreneurial ventures, Borovykh was an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick – Warwick Business School in Coventry, England, United Kingdom.
She worked as a Research Associate at Imperial College London, where she collaborated with JP Morgan AI Research on robust learning for deep neural networks.
Previously, Borovykha worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in the Amsterdam Area, Netherlands, researching the mechanisms of neural networks and developing robust and stable machine learning algorithms.
Borovykh earned her Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Applied Mathematics from Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna in 2018, graduating with honors (Cum Laude).
During this period, she contributed to the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant, focusing on managing risks in financial applications.
Before her doctoral studies, Borovykh pursued her Bachelor of Science (BS) in Applied Mathematics at Delft University of Technology.
Rina Joosten-Rabou
CEO and co-founder at Pera
Rina Joosten is an entrepreneur, board member, and publicist.
Rina is the co-founder and CEO of Pera, a startup that develops Pera Skope to support companies in investing in the right people confidently.
In 2019, Rina was named one of the 50 most inspiring, trailblazing women transforming tech in the Netherlands.
She serves in the Taskforce for AI in the Netherlands, counsels think tanks on AI policies, and serves as a mentor for startups.
The NextSpeaker represents her to speak on topics such as innovation, AI, and people science.
Rina holds a Master of Science (M.Sc.) from the University of Groningen.
Odette Scharenborg
Associate Professor at the Multimedia Computing Group at Delft University of Technology
Odette specialises in automatic and human speech recognition, word recognition, computational modeling, and phonetics.
In human speech recognition, she focuses on speech recognition by older adults, lexically-guided perceptual learning, and cognitive load.
In the field of automatic speech recognition, Odette’s expertise lies in the automatic recognition of articulatory features, employing support vector machines, and addressing challenges in low-resource languages.
Before joining Delft University, Odette worked as a Speech Researcher at M*Modal in the Nijmegen Area, Netherlands, and before that, she was a Visiting Researcher at Delft University of Technology.
Odette worked as an Associate Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen. She worked on a 5-year NWO-funded Vidi project titled “Ignoring the merry in marry: The effect of individual differences in attention and proficiency on non-native spoken-word recognition in noise.”
Before her position at Radboud University, Odette conducted research at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as a Post-doc at the Adaptive Listening Group.
Odette completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Automatic Speech Recognition at Radboud University from 1995 to 2000.
Later, she took the Human and Automatic Word Recognition field, earning her Ph.D. from Radboud University.
Saheli De
Senior Data Scientist at Blue Radix
With over four years of experience as a data scientist at Blue Radix, Saheli is passionate about developing algorithms that can run operational processes autonomously in greenhouses around the globe.
She applies her expertise in data science, machine learning, and optimisation to support data and software engineers during production software development and to visualise results for stakeholders.
She has a strong background in biomathematics, bioinformatics, and computational biology, which she acquired through an MS at Saarland University.
Rimma Dzhusupova
Mentor at the Women in AI Netherlands
As a Mentor at the Women in AI Netherlands mentorship programme, Rimma has dedicated her time voluntarily to guiding and supporting early-career talented women in Artificial Intelligence since July 2023.
Previously, Rimma was the Artificial Intelligence Initiative Lead for the Low Carbon Solutions business line.
Based in The Hague, South Holland, Netherlands, she established and currently leads a global team focusing on AI initiatives comprised of machine learning, deep learning programmers, and data scientists.
The team’s primary objective is to develop in-house or integrate externally developed AI-based applications to enhance engineering work processes, automate repetitive tasks, and incorporate available market solutions.
Before her leadership role in AI initiatives, Rimma held the position of Department Manager for Electrical & ICSS at McDermott International.
Her professional journey also includes a significant assignment at CB&I, where she served as a Lead Electrical Engineer, contributing to various EPC projects.
Prior to this, she held the role of Electrical Engineer and worked as a Field Electrical Engineer on the DONG project in Denmark.
Rimma pursued her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Artificial Intelligence in Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology from 2022 to 2026.
Earlier in her academic journey, Rimma earned a Professional Doctorate in Engineering (PDEng) focusing on Electrical Energy Systems at Eindhoven University of Technology.
Rimma’s academic journey includes a Master’s degree in Electricity Distribution and Market from LUT University in 2010, where she achieved a commendable grade.
Before that, she got a Master’s degree in Electromechanical Engineering in 2010 at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/netherlands-based-women-ai-experts-in-2024/
