The Team
Experts with different backgrounds, each with their own specialization.

Ralf Zoetekouw
"Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them."
Study background: BSc Econometrics & Operations Research, MSc Econometrics & Operations Research
Talents: Extracting value from data, translating business challenges and associated data.
Dedicated to data: From an early age I started keeping track of my tennis and football stats in a booklet. This passion for data continued a few years later by entering and analyzing these stats in Excel. I'm glad I can turn my hobby into my job!
Project with most impact: A model created for the social domain that predicts which households have a high probability of being eligible for financial aid in two years' time. In this way, these households are helped preventively and costs are saved.

Paul Peters
"You can't use up creativity, the more you use the more you get."
Study background: BSc Political Science (Minor Data Science), MSc Computer Science: Data Science
Talents: Implementing Data Science solutions with cloud technologies, Building analytical web applications, Predictive Analytics, Data Mining, Computer Vision.
Dedicated to data: A great eagerness to learn new innovations that create value, which drives me to help organizations get the most out of their data.
Project with most impact: Establishing a cloud data platform for data storage, processing, delivery, analysis and management. This has resulted in better insights into the available data through linked dashboards and it has resulted in a lot of time savings because the data was processed in automated data pipelines.

Feline van Pelt
"If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got”
Study: BSc Artificial Intelligence
Talents: Eager to learn, accurate, patient.
Dedicated to data: Many companies have data, but are not yet using it (optimally). A shame! It seems to me a very cool challenge to create valuable insights from that mass of information.
Project with most impact: Machine learning model built that can recognize emotion from speech fragments.

Job Oosterkamp
"Knowledge without action is meaningless."
Study background: BSc Econometrics & Operations Research, MSc Business Analytics & Operations Research
Talents: Combining data and customer knowledge to operate more efficiently or gain valuable insights.
Dedicated to data: Data contains an enormous amount of information, but this is often not immediately visible. By understanding this data, I always look for better solutions or useful insights.
Project with most impact: Researched demand forecasting for a logistics service provider to improve the added value of machine learning compared to standard techniques. to show.

Nina Krommedijk
"Even AI remains human work."
Study: BSc Data Science and Artificial Intelligence & 2nd degree Mathematics qualification.
Talents: Building bridges between abstract Data Science and today's business world. Convincing the customer of their needs and the opportunities available.
Dedicated to data: The options with data are endless, everyone can benefit from it, but do so with the right intentions. Many people, especially young people, associate math with boring formulas and useless tasks. How nice it is to convince precisely this target group of all the potential and to let them see how widely applicable mathematics is.
Project with most impact: Introducing Computational Thinking for young school students using Graph Theory. Here, students are introduced to programming and the associated thinking at a young age.

Remco Coppens
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Study: BSc Industrial Engineering and Management, MSc Operations Management and Logistics.
Talents: Incorporating advanced data concepts into operational processes.
Dedicated to data: Fascinated by the creation of value, often starting with a problem or a desire. A lot of companies have a lot of data at their disposal, but they do not see the opportunities that it can bring. To start with this data and build a product that extracts value from it, that makes a data project worthwhile.
Project with most impact: The development of a framework that is able to optimize warehouse lay-out and the underlying control policies of all types of warehouses. By simultaneous optimization of these aspects a global optimum can be attained, instead of the sub-optimal result obtained by separate optimization. The use of this framework automated this process and reduced the execution time from several months to only several hours.

Willem van der Geest
"If you don’t jump, you will never fly!"
Study: Post master Data Science & Business Analytics (Erasmus University)
Talents: Flexible, practical, eager to learn and social
Dedicated to data: I've done a lot of different data science projects in the last few years; from credit rating models to speech-to-text for customer service departments. But computer vision is the best technology I have ever worked with. Think about inspection of buildings based on drone images or self-driving cars. At Datacation I will use my passion for computer vision for a wonderful goal: improving healthcare in the Netherlands!
Project with most impact: For Royal HaskoningDHV I developed an optimization algorithm that searches for the best locations for charging infrastructure for electric cars (EVs) within municipalities. This takes into account, for example, the expected growth of EVs in a particular neighborhood, the distance to power lines and wheelchair accessibility. Meanwhile, more than 100 Dutch municipalities are using it!

Fatemeh Hashemi
"Don’t make it more complicated than it need to be. Keep life simple”
Study: BSc Industrial Engineering, MSc 1: MBA (Master of Business Adminstration) MSc 2: Data Science and Entrepreneurship
Talents: Business problem solving and helping SMEs grow by gaining insight from financial data.
Dedicated to data: I have more than six years of expertise in this field, working in a variety of positions like Business Controller and Data Analyst. To help businesses identify potential risks and possibilities, I enjoy mining financial data for information. My experience thus far has shown that decision-makers mostly base their decisions on their perception of the market and industry. Discovering the narrative hidden behind the facts might provide them a completely new perspective.
Project with most impact: Implementing the business managing dashboard report for a newly founded B2C organization. This dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of the month's performance in terms of sales, customers, and product baskets. It also enables decision makers to gather market insights and align their strategies accordingly.

Joep Beurskens
“Whatever you are, be a good one.”
Study background: BSc Mechanical Engineering, MSc Business Analytics & Operations Research
Talents: Analyze business processes and process the related data to support organizations in optimal data-driven decisions.
Dedicated to data: Since my initial introduction to data driven models, I developed a keen interest in the application and development of these concepts. Always thinking about how I could apply these techniques within a company.
Project with most impact: Extending a data structure used to model reasoning under uncertainty in the diagnosis of high-tech systems. The proposed method facilitates decision making under uncertainty. In doing so, it automatically proposes an optimal strategy (set of decisions) that minimizes the total cost of maintenance. This model enables the user to make cost-based decisions based on models learned and built from data and/or expert opinion.

Emma Ambags
"Without data you’re just another person with an opinion."
Study: BSc Business Administration, MSc Operations Management and Logistics
Talents: Inquisitive, friendly, social and critical.
Dedicated to data: The possibilities with data are endless; with the right smart algorithms, we can extract a lot of knowledge from data. In the future, the role of data in our daily lives will only increase. I find it an interesting and challenging task to contribute to this.
Project with most impact: Project with the biggest impact: developing an interpretable AI decision making model to support daily decisions made in a medical setting. This will allow doctors to get support in making daily decisions based on an interpretable algorithm. Besides being a way to gain new knowledge, it is also an emerging requirement for algorithms in sensitive sectors to provide insight into the process of decision making.

Dennis Böhm
“Laziness is the first step to efficiency"
Study background: BSc Computer Science and Engineering, MSc Computer Science, MSc Business Administration
Talents: Deep learning algorithms, always remaining critical, making one's future work easier.
Dedicated to data: It is fascinating how the right data can be used to create algorithms that see and discover things, that are hidden for a human.
Project with most impact: Help create a learning environment that enables thousands of companies to educate their millions of employees from around the world and make them smarter.

Bart Cleijsen
"You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step!"
Study background: BSc Economics and Business Economics, MSc Information Management.
Talents: Questioning and formulating the right KPIs on the business side and translating them to the data/IT departments.
Dedicated to data: Ensuring companies have an overview of their essential data and making it accessible, understandable and applicable.
Project with most impact: Translating business and data through interviews and model building.

Niek Bronswijk
"A river cuts through a rock not because of its power but its persistence."
Study: BSc International Economic Studies, MSc Econometrics & Operations Research
Talents: People-oriented, analytical, problem-solver and decisive.
Dedicated to data: From the start of my career, I have loved showing others what you can do with data. Using new data sources, then gaining insights from them and ultimately adjusting business operations with this is why I love working with data.
Project with most impact: I was the lead on a large loss project for Albert Heijn. For each store-product combination, we calculated an expected loss percentage in order to remediate certain poorly performing products on a store-specific basis. As a result, we threw away fewer products, which also made our customers happier. Win-win!

Cas Teeuwen
"Data is the new oil, it fuels the engine of technological progress"
Study background: BSc Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, MSc Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
Talents: Deep Learning, Evolutionary Algorithms, capturing customer needs, being inquisitive and critical.
Dedicated to data: In addition to my data-oriented studies, I find myself playing with new machine-learning models more often in my free time. In the past I have created applications with new data-management techniques and a nice font-end.
Project with most impact: Building out technical solutions in a project management tool for large customers, making their decisions faster and more impactful.

Maud Jacobs
"You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data"
Study: BSc International Business Administration, MSc Business Analytics & Operations Research
Talents: Enthusiastic, Eager to learn, Helpful and Social.
Dedicated to data: Data is growing faster than ever before, and there's a lot of interesting things to extract from it, but you have to know how. The goal is that even companies with less knowledge can gain insights, and we create a more data-driven society.
Project with most impact: For the largest BI supplier within the automotive industry in the Netherlands, I am developing a model that makes it possible to predict the replacement rate of car parts for countries within Europe.

Dirk Koelewijn
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”
Study: BSc Computer Science & Engineering, MSc Data Science and Engineering
Talents: Creating value out of (very) unstructured data and automating tasks that previously required human interaction.
Dedicated to data: Since a young age I have been fascinated by everything that could be automated, whether it are analyses or (physical) processes. As data scientist I enjoy providing organisations and teams with state-of-the-art deep-learning, natural language processing and computer vision technology. Together with the domain knowledge of customers we achieve maximum performance and maximum business value!
Project with most impact: Developing a method to use creative AI technology to reduce the need for annotated training data in complex natural language tasks. Using this method deep learning models can achieve a better understanding of how data is structured in general, making it easier to learn from limited and costly to obtain training data. This method allowed us to use 50% less training data while not compromising performance.

Joris Booij-Liewes
“Everything has value, discover how to incorporate it.”
Study: BSc Econometrics & Operations Research, MSc Econometrics & Operations Research
Talents: Operations Research, Machine Learning & Time Series Econometrics.
Dedicated to data: Giving everyone the opportunity to make the transition to a data-driven future. The win-win nature of optimisation using data makes me enthusiastic about making an impact with long-term improvements.
Project with most impact: Conducting research into a personalised and automated marketing strategy for the Eredivisie football club PSV with the aim of increasing turnover and customer satisfaction.