About Me

I'm a Senior AI Specialist at Van Lanschot Kempen with over seven years of experience designing, evaluating, and deploying AI systems. I specialize in translating complex business problems into practical technical solutions, particularly where success requires extracting meaning from large-scale, messy, or multimodal data.

My background combines deep technical expertise with a pragmatic approach to delivering value. I have worked across the full machine-learning lifecycle, from identifying and shaping use cases to collecting data, developing and evaluating models, and deploying reliable systems. My work has addressed challenges including sustainability analysis, greenwashing detection, interactive visual search, and large-scale multimedia understanding.

My path

I'm Ujjwal. I was born and grew up in New Delhi, India, and those early years instilled in me a deep curiosity about how things work and how they could work better.

In 2012, I moved to southern India to study Electronics and Communication Engineering at VIT University, Vellore. Those four years left me with an intense love for building new and better things from scratch, which ultimately led me to artificial intelligence.

In 2016, I moved to Amsterdam to pursue a Master's in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam. My master's thesis explored how machines interpret decision-making in interactive visual dialogue, working with Dr. Dieuwke Hupkes and Dr. Elia Bruni in the i-machine-think group at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation.

From 2018 to 2025, I completed my PhD at the Amsterdam Business School. My work focused on a difficult practical question: how can AI systems detect subjective, abstract concepts in messy, unstructured multimedia? I developed and evaluated methods for understanding concepts such as atmosphere, sustainability messaging, and brand identity, working across computer vision, NLP, and multimodal AI.

After completing my PhD, I worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam's Research Center for Sustainable Investments and Insurance, applying AI methods to real-world problems in sustainable finance and insurance. My academic work developed the rigorous approach to experimentation, evaluation, and evidence that I now bring to industry.

Alongside this work, I co-created Exquisitor, an interactive visual search system that combines conversational AI and relevance feedback to explore millions of images and videos with sub-second latency. Building and operating Exquisitor taught me how to turn novel ideas into dependable systems that remain responsive under demanding, real-time conditions.

Today

At Van Lanschot Kempen, I focus on applying AI to complex, high-impact problems in financial services. I care about building systems that are technically sound, useful in practice, and designed around the people and decisions they support.