Owlin expands development team
Two data scientists and a full-stack developer join in Q2
03 JUNE 2015, AMSTERDAM
Summary
Owlin hires three programmers in a difficult job market.Three computer science wizards joined Owlin the second quarter of 2015.
Francesco Puglierin (31) is from Asolo in the Veneto, in the north of Italy, 'Just north of Venice. Well, Treviso actually,' he explains. He studied Computer Science at the University of Padua and he first landed in The Netherlands through the Erasmus programme. After a brief interval working for Citi in Barcelona, he came back to study in Utrecht where he graduated with a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence at the end of 2012. His first 'real' job was with a Kickstarter project that took him to Shenzhen, China. After working on a number of other projects as a freelancer, he spent the last six months refining his Data Science skills and entered the job market again. He chose Owlin over an offer from a company with 8.000 employees and 150 offices worldwide.
"I like small companies. It's more challenging, but there is so much stuff to learn! The environment is very dynamic, and you feel your contribution can really make the difference"
At Owlin, Francesco will work on improving Owlin's natural language processing capabilities.
Carmine Paolino (who will turn 28 this summer) works one day a week at Owlin while he finishes his Master’s thesis in Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam with specialization in Technical Artificial Intelligence.
The thesis is titled ‘Music Genre Recognition with Deep Neural Networks.’ Carmine’s aim is to develop an algorithm that recognizes genres of music from the audio signal and continually improves that ability through AI. He hopes to complete his Master’s in August and join Owlin full-time after that. At Owlin, he is currently responsible for improving the clustering algorithm.
He came to Amsterdam after completing his B.Sc at Bologna, a university recommended by friends from back home (Castrovillari, Calabria) for the quality of its computer science department. In high school in Castrovillari, he was a Gentoo Linux programmer as well as an ambitious chess player and an accomplished karate master. He now spends a lot of his spare time composing electronic music and playing as a DJ at various clubs in Amsterdam.
Carmine started using computers at the age of 3, and 'since then I fell in love with them,' he says.
Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen (33) will be 'full-stack' developer at Owlin, meaning he will develop front end, back end and everything in between on Owlin's products. Initially, he will focus on improving the API. How did he end up at Owlin?
'Well, I met Bas (van Ooyen) in the bar, actually,' he says with a grin. In the Cafe Belgie on the Oude Gracht in Utrecht, to be precise. Autumn 2014. They discovered their shared passion for programming and Bas invited him to work on a new product - the user interface for a new product for one of Owlin's clients in the financial sector.
Ralf grew up and went to high school in Alphen aan den Rijn and studied Computer Science at Utrecht University. He found that he was more interested in developing for himself than executing school assignments. He has been working on projects ever since and still spends part of his time working for clients other than Owlin.
Ralf's interests are philosophy, politics and science.
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About Owlin
About the Company:
Amsterdam-based Owlin has been developing news search and analysis tools since its inception in 2012. Owlin's proprietary search and analysis software helps you gain control over the wealth of information on the internet. Owlin scans more than 2 million news sources around the world, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 'turns the news into actionable intelligence'.