About Me

I’m currently Lead Data Intelligence for Obvion, a mortgage provider in the Netherlands. I have a background in Human-Centered AI: how we can use AI in a way that actually helps people and society. In my current role I rely on this background to ensure we develop and deploy AI and data-driven solutions in a way that betters the lives of our colleagues, employees, customers and other parties interacting with us, by combining (applied) machine learning, psychological theory and interaction design. 

The internet you see is different from the internet I see… Efforts in various areas of research have resulted in algorithms that allow us to build systems such as personalized search engines, recommender systems and targeted advertising. These systems control what content an individual user receives based on how they have behave online.

My aim is to make sure that wherever we use data-driven solutions and artificial intelligence, this is done in a user-centered fashion. A lot of effort goes into engineering challenges (e.g. how to use historical data to make predictions), implementing these systems and ensuring they actually serve their purpose in helping people comes with numerous design challenges. The way in which I want to overcome these challenges is by adopting a more user-centered perspective, taking into account the users’ psychology and their subjective experience. I believe the only way to successfully create personalized systems is to apply machine learning taking user’s psychology and their feedback into account.

This approach is described in more detail in my PhD thesis titled `From behavior-centered to user-centered: incorporating psychological knowledge and user feedback in personalization’.