About

Sofie Van Landeghem is a highly skilled Lead Machine Learning Engineer who specializes in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). With over 13 years of experience in the field, she firmly believes that data has the power to transform decision-making in industry. Sofie has a Master's degree in Computer Science (Software Engineering) and a PhD in Sciences (Bioinformatics). Sofie has worked in various industries, including pharmaceuticals and food, and has been working on the open-source NLP library spaCy since 2019. She is a key contributor to the development of spaCy and associated libraries such as Thinc, a functional deep learning library, and spacy-transformers. As a Lead Machine Learning Engineer at Explosion, she leads the development of these libraries. Sofie is passionate about software engineering and has a love for quality assurance and testing. She enjoys introducing proper levels of abstraction and ensuring code robustness and modularity. She has worked on various topics, including entity linking, coreference resolution, relation extraction, tokenization speed, and performance of regular expressions. Before joining Explosion, Sofie was the owner of OxyKodit, a company that provided tailored solutions for data-driven needs, including ML and NLP. She has also worked as an ML and NLP Engineer at Explosion, where she implemented novel functionality in the open-source NLP and ML libraries spaCy and Thinc. Sofie's educational background includes a PhD in Sciences (Bioinformatics) from Universiteit Gent, a Machine Learning Summer School from the University of Cambridge, and a Master's degree in Computer Science (Software Development) from Universiteit Gent. Sofie's tech stack includes ML, NLP, Deep Learning, testing, quality assurance, tokenization, and software engineering. With 10.52 years of relevant experience, Sofie is a highly skilled and experienced Lead Machine Learning Engineer who is passionate about using data to drive decision-making in industry.