Yannick De Bock

I obtained my M.Sc degree in Electronics and ICT Engineering Technology (cum laude) from Artesis University College of Antwerp in 2012, and a M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence (magna cum laude) from KU Leuven in 2013. I finished my Ph.D in Engineering Science at KU Leuven in January 2022. My research is focused on user modeling for personalizing products, with smart heating being the main application. There, the aim is to optimize the comfort-consumption trade-off by tailoring heating control to the user’s specific needs. During my research I built several sensing setups (wireless sensor/actuator networks communicating over radio or Z-wave) to collect occupancy data and processed this data to model and predict user activities. To this end I implemented various unsupervised (several clustering techniques, PCA, SVD, etc.) and supervised learning (classifiers) algorithms in Python. In one of the setups I deployed my algorithms to intelligently steer heating control according to expected user behaviour, which led to substantial energy savings.