Jan-Willem van Leussen

Jan-Willem van Leussen has extensive work experience in the field of speech and language technology. Jan-Willem is currently working as an R&D Engineer at Gerimedica since December 2022. Previously, they worked at Attendi as a Speech Engineer from October 2020 to November 2022, where they developed best-in-market ASR models for the Dutch healthcare domain and led research into new model architectures and data acquisition strategies. Before that, they were a Speech Engineer at AmberScript from October 2019 to July 2020, where they trained Kaldi ASR models for various European languages and improved the automation and efficiency of the model training pipeline.

In 2018, Jan-Willem worked at Aigent as an Automatic Speech Recognition Engineer. Jan-Willem was responsible for improving the call center ASR accuracy by transitioning from Nuance Transcription Engine to Kaldi TDNN models, resulting in a significant reduction in error rate. From 2016 to 2018, they worked at IPsoft as a Senior R&D Engineer, focusing on improving the linguistic and cognitive abilities of the chatbot Amelia using AI and NLP techniques.

Jan-Willem also worked as a Dev Engineer at ING in 2016, where they were part of the team responsible for creating SMS and push notification APIs. Jan-Willem started their career as a Software Trainee at Young Colfield in 2015, where they worked on speech-driven applications and NLP projects.

Before entering the industry, Jan-Willem gained teaching experience as an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam from 2009 to 2014 and as a Lecturer at Hogeschool van Amsterdam from 2012 to 2014.

Jan-Willem van Leussen has a strong educational background in linguistics. Jan-Willem completed their Doctor of Philosophy - PhD in Linguistics from the University of Amsterdam, from 2009 to 2020. Prior to this, they obtained an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the same university, between 2007 and 2009. Jan-Willem also holds an MA in General Linguistics from the University of Amsterdam, earned from 2006 to 2008. Their undergraduate degree is a BA in Linguistics, which they acquired from the University of Amsterdam from 2002 to 2006.

In addition to their academic degrees, Jan-Willem van Leussen has obtained a certification as an Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 7 Programmer from Oracle in November of 2015.