I'm Thomas van Dongen. I am currently working as head of AI engineering at Springer Nature. I am one of the founding members of The Minish Lab where we develop open-source machine learning packages.

My research interests include:

• 🚤 Small, fast models: Making CPU-friendly models.
• 🧩 Embeddings: Focusing on static embeddings to balance performance and resource usage.
• ⚡ Efficient Nearest Neighbors: Optimizing ANN/KNN methods for high-speed search and scalable similarity comparisons.
• 🔍 Recommenders: Developing smarter systems to improve recommendations and information retrieval, focussed on the scientific publishing space.

I'm currently working on:

• model2vec: a library for creating state-of-the-art static embeddings by distilling sentence transformers.
• vicinity: a library for fast and lightweight nearest neighbors, with flexible indexing backends.
• tokenlearn: a library for pre-training static embeddings.

Info:

• LinkedIn
• Google Scholar
• Medium