Jeroen Janssens
Jeroen Janssens, PhD, is a data science consultant and certified instructor. His expertise lies in visualizing data, implementing machine learning models, and building solutions using Python, R, JavaScript, and Bash. He’s passionate about helping and teaching others to do such things.
Jeroen works as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Xomnia in Amsterdam. Previously, he was an assistant professor at Jheronimus Academy of Data Science and a data scientist at Elsevier in Amsterdam and several startups in New York City.
He is the author of Data Science at the Command Line (O’Reilly, 2021) and Python Polars: The Definitive Guide (with Thijs Nieuwdorp; to be published by O’Reilly in January 2025). Jeroen holds a PhD in machine learning from Tilburg University and an MSc in artificial intelligence from Maastricht University.
Website: https://jeroenjanssens.com
Sessions
In this talk, I’ll share my journey of animating UMAP, a cutting-edge dimensionality reduction algorithm, by visualizing not just its final output but each intermediate step as well. I’ll explain why and how I modified UMAP’s source code, while also demonstrating the use of Polars for data wrangling, Plotnine for visualization, and ffmpeg for animation. The result ultimately earned me a runner-up position in the 2024 Plotnine plotting contest.