Contributor Spotlight: September 2020

This is the first installment in our monthly Contributor Spotlight. Meet Kees from the tech team!

Hi everyone, and welcome to the first installment of Contributor Spotlights! Each month we will highlight a different contributor from our global community to show off what an amazing team we’ve built! For today’s post, we interviewed Kees, who is currently working on an algorithm for AI tree recognition.

Kees is a 7-foot-tall friendly giant who currently lives in Tilburg, Netherlands with 15 other students. After graduating with a MSc in Artificial Intelligence & Information Management, he found a job as Data Analyst. Even though he has been working for a couple of months now, he has yet to say goodbye to his student dorms yet. This makes sense if you consider his passion for cooking; nowhere else will you receive as much appreciation for your cooking skills as in student housing with 15 hungry students!

Kees joined the Greenstand community only recently. As a member of the tech team, he is currently developing an algorithm that can recognize tree species, age and the location of the trees we track. Although distinguishing between tree species can often be difficult to the untrained eye, Kees says that seeing the results of his hard work is very motivating. His father is a florist, and while Kees was never particularly interested in his work, the intricacies of identifying tree species have brought him closer to his father. Kees told us, “As I look through the glasses of a programmer, trying to detect species and age of a tree through AI, I find myself talking to him and asking questions about his work more frequently.” This summer, Kees’ algorithm achieved a 35% success rate in tree recognition! We have no doubt that his algorithm will continue to improve over the coming months. When Kees isn’t hard at work as our AI superstar or cooking with his housemates, he enjoys hiking and working out at the gym.

Thanks for checking out this month’s contributor spotlight! See you next month!


Robin Vos

Communications Assistant, Greenstand


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