From ICT student to AI startup

In the latest episode of the AI Garage podcast, host Erdinç explores the fascinating world of artificial intelligence and how this technology affects our daily lives. This time, he welcomes Niek van Dam, an alumnus of Fontys ICT and founder of the company Open Maze.

During his studies, Niek, along with friends and fellow students Ruben and Max, founded their own start-up 'Open Maze'. Open Maze focuses on making new technologies accessible. Niek: "Actually, for us it's mainly experimenting with cool technologies and making them usable for people who are interested in them." Open Maze's main activity is currently language processing, with a focus on intelligent chatbots and techniques to extract information from knowledge bases and large datasets.

Innovative AI applications
When the coalition formation was still in full swing and nothing was yet clear regarding the coalition agreement, Niek and his team realised a project in which they used AI to generate the coalition agreement. This project shows how artificial intelligence can help summarise large amounts of text, such as election programmes to create a concise coalition agreement. Training the AI also covers topics such as ehtics and truths. Niek explains: "We assume that when we use a language model, such as OpenAI that there is some level of assurance behind it. That it is not going to generate ontetic things."

Media attention
Besides their work on the coalition agreement, Niek and his team were also in the news at the beginning of the year with their AI project on Who is the Mole. What started as something small quickly grew into a serious project. With help from Citric Labs and Wesmile, they used AI techniques to unmask the mole.

This caught the attention of the media, including Hart van Nederland and NOS Stories. Niek says: "I thought I would have a quiet Thursday, but suddenly I was fully booked until 5 p.m." Listen to the full episode of AI Garage to learn more about the exciting developments in the world of artificial intelligence and the inspiring projects of Niek van Dam and his team at Open Maze.

https://open.spotify.com/episo... (podcast is in Dutch)