Damien Cormann

Current

Data scientist · Belgian Home Affairs FPS

Since 2017

PoCs on locally hosted LLMs, infrastructure of the in-house innovation lab, technical advice on data architecture and processing pipelines.

Technology watch on quantum computing and cryptography, and on ML/AI. Belgian representative in the AI working group of eu-LISA, the EU agency managing large-scale IT systems. Member of the Quantum Circle. Internal point of contact for the beQCI initiative, the Belgian rollout of the European Quantum Communication Infrastructure.

Details

AI/ML delivery

Design and run PoCs on locally hosted LLMs and data-driven decision-support tools. Several have been used in production.
Build, run and maintain the infrastructure of the in-house innovation lab.
Test models and solutions on that infrastructure: reproducing results, benchmarking performance, checking resource requirements.
Maintain an in-house demonstration cluster running agentic workflows on local model instances, keeping sensitive data within the organisation's perimeter.
Build and maintain an internal R library for analysis, forecasting and research.

Technical advisory

Advise on model selection and design for solutions delivered by internal and external providers.
Advise on data architecture and processing pipelines, including real-time and near-real-time flows.

Advisory notes

Author advisory notes and executive summaries on AI/ML and emerging technologies for non-technical management, covering quantum computing and its operational implications, quantum readiness, quantum communication and post-quantum cryptography.

Earlier

2016 Business analyst · Belgian Home Affairs FPS, ICT

Within the data team of an internal application refactoring project. Worked at the interface between business and IT: eliciting requirements, modelling end-to-end processes in BPMN, and translating operational needs into specifications that held up technically.

Much of that work sat on the data side: mapping flows between source systems and consumers, working through data models and structures with internal and external data team members, and making sure process design accounted for where data came from, how it was stored and who used it downstream.

Also one of the internal functional administrators of the BPMN tool, supporting the modelling repository and its conventions.

2015 – 2016 Data scientist · IPM

Social media intelligence. Advanced website traffic analysis through the Google Analytics API and other tools.

Advisory on technical issues related to large-scale data acquisition, retention and processing, spanning data lake architectures, NoSQL databases and data warehouse or datamart design. Advisory on data management for real-time bidding: collection and storage architecture for bid flows, volume and latency constraints.

2008 – 2015 Logistics operations manager · IPM

Managed the team computing print-run allocations per point of sale for the newspapers La Libre Belgique and La DH and the periodicals Paris Match and Courrier international, and generating production orders to the printing plant.

Audited and fine-tuned the applications and processes involved. Designed, built and validated a BI solution in R for data mining and self-generating sales KPIs.

2007 – 2008 Sales data analyst · IPM

On-demand reporting on sales and subscriptions for the board and the marketing department. Set up a knowledge centre as a wiki library.

Tools: R · SQL · Linux · Hadoop ecosystem · locally hosted LLMs · Shiny
Fields: Modelling and constrained optimisation · data architecture · operations research · applied AI/ML
Languages: French · Dutch · English
Education: UCL, master in management sciences, focus on logistics and supply chain management, finance. Cum laude.