Karolien Scheerlinck

VDAB

Manager of the AI Center of Excellence

Description

Ms. Karolien Scheerlinck graduated from Ghent University in 2007 with a master's degree in Bioscience Engineering. She then started a PhD at the department “Mathematical modelling, Statistics and Bioinformatics” with a focus on heuristic optimisation algorithms. She had a first working experience as research engineer at the Belgian railway company Infrabel, where she focussed on optimising the robustness of the railway timetables. In 2014, she started to work for Be-Mobile as research engineer in the innovation lab, where she was in charge of developing algorithms to extract important insights out of traffic data. In 2017, she was recruited by VDAB as a data scientist. She worked in the innovation lab of VDAB and was, among other things, responsible for developing VDAB’s first Artificial Intelligence model “Distance to the labour market”. This model is currently used to prioritise jobseekers according to their probability to find a job. Between 2017 and 2019, the innovation lab expanded quickly and became a more mature team. Karolien played an important role as Data Scientist Lead within this team. In 2020, she became the manager of this team and transformed it into the AI Center of Excellence of VDAB. This team has a track record of award-winning tools, such as our AI vacancy matching engine Jobnet and our orientation tool Jobreach.