Dreaming of AI with Bart Baesens
As part of BPOC’s Dreaming of AI series we have invited Bart Baesens professor of Big Data & Analytics at KU Leuven (Belgium) and lecturer at the University of Southhampton (UK) to share his research. This talk will elaborate on some recent developments in generative AI. There will be a discussion on large language models (e.g., ChatGPT, BERT), the underlying transformer architecture (encoder/decoder setup), and the attention mechanism. Join us as we discuss the economic, job,
and educational impact of these technologies.
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We will zoom in on AGI/Singularity and review key criteria for trustworthy AI such as open source, education, transparency, regulation, and explainability. We will examine key challenges including untapping new sources of data, cause and effect reasoning, multimodal AI, neuro-symbolic AI, and AI systems capturing a world model.
Teacher / speaker
Professor Bart Baesens is a professor of Big Data & Analytics at KU Leuven (Belgium), and a lecturer at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom). He has done extensive research on big data & analytics, AI, credit risk modeling, fraud detection, and marketing analytics. He co-authored more than 250 scientific papers and 10 books some of which have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Kazakh, and sold more than 40,000 copies of these books
world-wide. Bart received the OR Society’s Goodeve medal for best JORS paper in 2016 and the EURO 2014 and EURO 2017 award for best EJOR paper. His research is summarized at www.dataminingapps.com. He also regularly tutors, advises and provides consulting support to international firms with respect to their analytics and credit risk management strategy. Bart is listed in the top 2% of Stanford University's new Database of Top Scientists in the World. He was also named one of the World's top educators in Data Science by CDO magazine
in 2021 and 2023. Bart has educated tens of thousands of data scientists across the globe in the fields of analytics, credit risk, fraud, marketing, ICT and others. Bart also has his own ON-LINE learning BlueCourses platform: www.bluecourses.com which features courses on machine learning, credit risk, fraud, marketing, text analytics, deep learning, web scraping etc.
In memoriam Bart Baesens
With great sadness, VAIA learned of the passing of Prof. Bart Baesens in August 2025.
Bart was a passionate lecturer and expert who had a remarkable talent for making complex knowledge accessible. His online courses remain valuable and relevant, and will stay listed on vaia.be as a lasting tribute to his work and his impact on AI education.
