Katrien Laenen

Background

About Katrien Laenen

Online shopping has become a big part of our lives. The ability to shop anywhere, anytime and the extensive variety and availability leave pretty much everything the world has to offer at your fingertips. However, the extensive product selection online makes it easy for customers to feel overwhelmed and unable to find the products they are looking for. Therefore, I want to develop recommender systems that generate personalized recommendations and leverage understandable explanations (i.e, imagery and natural language) to promote fairness, transparency and trust. Since 2017, I have been conducting research at the LIIR group of the Human-Computer Interaction group of the KU Leuven funded by a FWO PhD Fellowship (SB) and later a FWO Postdoctoral Fellowship. This allows me to combine my passion for fashion with my interest in AI and deep learning. More precisely, my research interests are computer vision, natural language processing, recommender systems, information retrieval, multimodal representation learning, disentangled representation learning, attention mechanisms, and explainable and responsible AI. Since 2022, I teach the lectures on natural language processing for the course Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing (B-KUL-H0Q35A) taught at the Master for AI in Business and Industry at KU Leuven Kulak.