Tessa Van Der Heiden
Senior Data Scientist
Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTessa Van Der Heiden is a Senior Data Scientist with eight years of industry and academic experience building ML-driven products for automotive and media platforms. She has a strong systems-and-control foundation (MSc, Delft) and a track record at BMW of turning research—GAN-DDPG trajectory prediction, planning for human-robot interaction—into published, deployable solutions. More recently she helped the Dutch public broadcaster scale personalized recommendations for 3 million weekly users and improved resilient search handling of spelling and syntax errors. Tessa bridges deep research (inverse reinforcement learning for image-based autonomous driving) with production engineering, shipping features in cross-functional teams and on real hardware. Colleagues describe her as pragmatic and safety-minded: she has repeatedly prioritized safe exploration and robustness over optimistic prototypes. Based in Utrecht, she blends academic rigor with product focus to deliver interpretable, safety-first ML systems.
8 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc), Systems & Control, Master of Science (MSc), Systems & Control at Delft University of TechnologyDa Vinci College Leiden
Dutch, English, German, French
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (63)
deep-q-network10
collision10
prediction10
actor-critic10
q-learning10
flora9
reinforcement-learning9
algorithms9
python9
paper9
ddpg9
rest9
sarsa9
api9
dqn9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
tessavdheiden/social_empowerment
Jun 2020 - Jan 2023
Contributions:134 commits, 125 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 8 months
tessavdheiden/path_planning
Jun 2019 - Nov 2019
Contributions:62 commits, 2 pushes in 4 months
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