Our insights into artificial intelligence

At Brainjar, we are real Apple fans. Most of us use a MacBook Pro, and when Apple released the new MacBooks with upgraded hardware (M2 Pro and M2 Max chips), we couldn’t wait to order them and test them out. Of course, as we are all AI engineers and data scientists, we couldn’t let the opportunity pass by to test the M2 chips and benchmark them. 

Data, the backbone of machine learning

You can compare machine learning without data to a car without fuel — you won’t get far if you don’t have any. So, whenever we start a new AI project, we first look at the data, as our systems are only as good as the data we use to train the model.

While looking for internships, I thought of searching for an AI-based project at De Cronos Groep or even Brainjar specifically since multiple friends had recommended an internship with them. So, when my time came to apply for internships, I did not hesitate to contact them and was very excited when they responded for an interview.

It's no secret that AI has become an increasingly important part of our lives. From helping us to perform tasks more efficiently to making complex decisions, AI algorithms are becoming more and more sophisticated. But what if I told you that there is a type of AI algorithm that can actually generate its own content? This type of AI algorithm is called a generative AI, and it's capable of creating everything from text to images to music.

The impact of machine learning on the environment. Do you often reflect and think about it? Where does the responsibility of making green choices lie? Users, researchers, programmers, hardware developers, or somewhere else?

Geertrui Mieke De Ketelaere makes a particularly energetic impression throughout the interview. And yet she calls herself functionally lazy.

"I am someone who really doesn't get energy from silly, repetitive actions, but prefers to be creative. As a kid, I was always optimizing my imposed tasks and thus often automating them. This is probably where my passion for tech comes from. Technology takes over certain tasks from humans. Think about a dishwasher or a car. I quickly saw the benefits of that."

Why not use some really serious, cool, advanced AI technologies to make something very fun and silly? Well, that is exactly what we aim to do on our so-called Brainjar days. During a Brainjar day, everyone on the team receives the opportunity to experiment with something of their choice. So, I thought: what if I could use AI image generation to merge two faces?

In this blog, I want to give you some do’s and don’ts pointers when it comes to code optimization. In addition, I explain how you can identify possible optimizations in your code, and how to optimize.

The Brainhouse project's purpose was to put together a diverse squad of interns who would work on a case with social impact. This time, we tackled a case for ALS Liga.

'Next-level drive and dive' is typical for project manager Nelleke Doyen. She puts her talent for 'bringing gusto' in projects to good use in her work, where she brings her passion for innovative technology, AI, and people to life. Read her story.

After studying veterinary medicine in Portugal and kite surfing in the Philippines, Leonor Drummond retrained as a data scientist in artificial intelligence in Belgium. Her story consists mainly of learning a lot, preferably as fast as possible. Read here how Leonor found her place at Brainjar after an intensive agile journey, or rather, race.

A passion for AI and Big Data, that's what everyone in the audience shared on the evening of 10/5. Emilie Nenquin (VRT) and Nele Gerrits (VITO) inspired us with different AI use cases in our headquarters. Afterward, Clusity organized a warm networking session. Thanks to Clusity for organizing a successful event. Below you will find a summary and links to the presentations and photos. 👇🏼

For a jewelry webshop, we built an AI-driven image search function based on similarity embedding to simplify the classification of jewels together.

As you may know, we have been developing and improving our intelligent document processing platform, Klassif.ai, for a while now. Our objective is simple: we want to unburden you of repetitive, manual tasks like processing documents so you can spend your valuable time elsewhere. However, building a platform that can help you with this isn’t as easy as you might think, especially since we wanted to process any document.

During my twelve-week-long internship at Brainjar, I created a deep learning model that can perform eye tracking using webcam images. In this blog, I’ll explain how I went to work.

While looking for a possible internship, one immediately got my attention. Building a ‘face animation tool’. I couldn’t let this opportunity slip by. The goal of this internship was to start from a face, and making the mouth move when given an audio sample.

A story about my time at Brainjar as an intern, where I work on CSI-style image enhance AI including super-resolution, colorizing and denoising.

Brainjar created a terrific software tool to tackle these challenges, which they’ve named Klassif.ai. This platform helps you intelligently process all types of documents. Moreover, TPO Agency plays a guiding role in the development process of Klassif.ai.

Turning Leuven into an accessible and traffic-safe city.

This summer, Brainjar offered me the internship of a lifetime: classifying Dutch Sign Language videos. I had an absolute blast trying to tame this beast.

Tired of processing thousands of documents manually? Check out our new AI platform, Klassif.ai, and process documents at a faster pace. In short: manual labour, done artificially!

Some time ago, we were invited for a meeting with a chemicals group with an interest in AI. We built a tool that uses AI to evaluate presentations.

Cloud Functions: A simple approach to building an event driven system

Using deep learning methods, we tried to tackle the problem of detecting concrete cracks in bridges. The results exceeded our expecations.

OpenPose represents the first real-time multi-person system to jointly detect human body, hand, facial, and foot keypoints on single images.

Recently, Sam Sterckval joined Brainjar as an AI intern. By combining his background in electrical engineering with his passion for artificial intelligence, he is ready to tackle some intersting AI projects!

During our masterclass "cognitive RPA" we demonstrate the possibilities of combining artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA).

A few months ago we made a style transfer application to demo the capabilities of the Genius supercomputer cluster. And now we got our hands on a PowerAI which IBM generously loaned to us for a couple of months to use. Time to see how it stacks up against Genius in painting!

A smart billboard will get your attention and give recommendations about events, promotions, restaurants, sights to visit...

OpenAI Gym is a cool platform for anybody involved with reinforcement learning algorithms

Klassif.ai is Brainjar’s automation platform for document processing. In this blog post, we will discuss what our journey toward an own annotator looked like. Especially: where we ran into doors and how we found ways to open them. Oh, and there's a surprise at the end!