Meet our newest team member: A Passionate Open Source Developer with a love for NLP!
We are excited to introduce Tom Aarsen, our latest team member at Argilla. He's an experienced open source developer with a strong passion for NLP. Tom first came to our attention when he contributed to Argilla in 2022, back when we were still called Rubrix. He has also worked on several projects lead by one of our advisers, and it quickly became clear that he boasts an impressive GitHub profile. Tom has continued to demonstrate his skills and passion for open source development, and we knew he was a perfect fit for our team!
Tom has contributed to many open-source projects in addition to Argilla. He is known for his exceptional attention to detail, especially when it comes to pull requests. In his own words, he "loves writing detailed pull requests" and takes pride in his work.
Look a little lower to get an understanding of what we mean with “attention to detail” 🤩
He is most proud of his work as a core maintainer of these projects:
- nltk: The Natural Language Toolkit.
- 🤗 SetFit: Efficient few-shot text classification with Sentence Transformers.
With a deep love for Python and NLP, Tom brings a unique skill set to our team. He's currently studying Computer Science at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, specializing in Data Science. He is eager to apply his knowledge and experience to our work here at Argilla.
Outside of work, Tom enjoys a variety of hobbies including programming, working out, video games, cycling, and origami.
"3d origami", involves folding a lot of small modular pieces that can be combined into a larger sculpture, by Tom Aarsen
He finds programming to be a fun and relaxing activity that allows him to explore new technologies and ideas. Any optimization problem excites him, regardless of whether the goal is to optimize performance metrics, time efficiency, implementation conciseness or training data efficiency.
At Argilla, Tom will be writing a Master’s thesis on Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition in collaboration with Hugging Face and Intel Labs. We're confident that his passion, skills, and experience will be valuable assets to our team.
We are already enjoying working with Tom and can’t wait for more exciting things this year!
Join us in welcoming Tom to the team!
