At Xomnia, we are passionate about empowering people, society, and businesses in our community to responsibly seize the opportunities offered by data and AI. We believe that it is our responsibility as an industry leader to share our AI expertise and resources whenever possible, and always enable the use of AI as a tool for the good.
Below are some of the initiatives that we have participated in or supported in this pursuit:
Open Source Community/ Polars
Almost all the projects that we deliver at Xomnia are created using open source software and code. As sharing knowledge is Xomnia’s #1 value, we believe in giving back to the open source community. We do this by, for example, fully supporting our Machine Learning Engineer Ritchie Vink as he created and continues to advance the DataFrame library Polars. Ritchie’s contribution to the open source community delivered one of the fastest DataFrame libraries in Rust, Python and NodeJS.
Our sponsorship allows Polars to grow. Last year has seen a surge in Polars' stability, new features, and -consequently- community adoption. For instance, the Polars query engine is used in nushell and explorer.
Equals Role Model Campaign
On Women's Day 2024, we were proud to partner with Equals Amsterdam's Role Model Campaign, which boasted posters of successful women in tech across Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. Our Head of data & AI Cheryl Zandvliet participated, hoping that women and girls who see her poster in Amsterdam's streets get encouraged and inspired to choose a career in tech.
MODIR
Xomnia, the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), and the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI: Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) have collaborated to advance the precision of medical treatments, specifically radiation therapy for cervical cancer patients.
As part of Xomnia’s initiatives, Xomnia contributed to the project starting 2017 via an in-kind investment, assigning a few hours every week to our consultants to help the research team with their data-related challenges. The project is expected to carry on until 2025.
The Ocean Cleanup
The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization developing advanced technologies to rid the oceans of plastic, has partnered with Xomnia to build its data ingestion infrastructure.
Xomnia has volunteered to build a scalable Azure-based data streaming platform for The Ocean Cleanup, moving it from prototype to production in under three months. The Ocean Cleanup’s data engineering team is using this infrastructure to centrally ingest and store data collected from various locations across the world, which helps them do their jobs in a better and faster manner.
We continue to sponsor this project, delivering data-driven solutions for their Oceans, Rivers and R&D teams.
FruitPunch – AI for good
Our consultants constantly volunteer in hackathons and challenges to come up with AI-driven solutions for global problems. To support them in their endeavors, we are keen to partner up with initiatives that focus on the use of AI for good, such as the FruitPunch AI for Good Community.
Our machine learning engineers have participated in multiple challenges for FruitPunch AI, delivering a model that detects rhino poachers in real-time in South Africa, models that can help in performing predictive maintenance on the blades of wind turbines, and the blueprint of a predicitive model that can make accurate predictions about the likelihood of flash floods happening in the short term.
Knowledge sharing events
We proudly host the Data & Drinks event series, which takes place almost every month and is open to all professionals interested in diving deeper into a plethora of AI-related topics.
Data & Drinks provides a platform for data and AI professionals to share their hands-on expertise regarding topics related to the responsible use of AI, state-of-the-art technologies in data, and others.