Edition 4: Humans of The Builders Club

An inside peak inside the arena, spotlighting builders turning their dreams into reality.

Humans of Builder Club

[Edition #3] Written with by Isabelle De Backer, Rebecca Williams and Annie Liao

We are so excited to share the next instalment of “Humans of Builders Club”. A series spotlighting the authentic human story of ambitious AI Builders.

This week, we’re chatting with Isabelle De Backer, senior software engineer, solution architect and product manager, currently working on developing an AI-driven summarisation pipeline for scientific papers 🚀!

Let's start with your background! Can you share with us your career journey and what led you to what you're currently doing?

As a teenager, I got fascinated with coding because it allows you to build worlds with “just your imagination”. I taught myself assembly language on an Atari 1040 ST and was doing graphic demos.

My journey led me to an engineering master's degree in Belgium and a software engineering career. Life took me to Australia with my son, working as an IT Delivery Lead in banking, alongside life as a competing pole dancing athlete and personal trainer. Then I had another son, and after a fulfilling motherhood break, I completed a Masters in Complex Systems in Sydney Uni and returned to engineering, now focusing on AI to pursue my dream of understanding and building with this transformative technology.

What inspires you as an entrepreneur?

My drive stems from a desire to positively impact the world and be a force for good. I'm passionate about the synergy between mental and physical health, and advancing resource sustainability. These goals fuel my journey and define my mission.

How did you build up your technical expertise during a typical week?

As I am time-poor, my approach to developing technical expertise is to develop focus and efficiency strategies. What do I want to achieve this week? Why? How useful is it going to be for what I want to do?

I engage in online training, read newsletters, and participate in real life events to learn and discuss with experts. But most of all I enjoy learning with hands-on projects and interacting with peers in groups like The Builders Club.

Journaling daily learnings helps me consolidate knowledge (“today I learned” bullet points). (PS. I'm exploring AI solutions to organize these insights more effectively ;)

Can you recommend any books, podcasts, links that have helped you on your builder journey?

I started my AI journey with Andrew Ng, and Jeremy Howard Fast.Ai. The Master of Complex Systems gave me great foundations in network science and systems thinking.

I’m currently progressing on this video from Andrej Karpathy to build a transformer from scratch. 

I follow these 2 newsletters Alex Xu’s ByteByteGo for system design and Damien Benveniste’s The AI Edge and Jerry Liu’s LlamaIndex for connecting LLMs to data.

What are you most excited about right now?

I’m excited to start the year  with The Builders Club vibrant community. While I have a few projects in mind, the most exciting is the possibility to collaborate with Jan Zheng and Jessica Satcher on building an agentic solution to summarize scientific research papers about phages. A bacteriophage may save you one day from an antibiotic resistant bacteria! Furthermore, intelligent agents solutions for knowledge processing is a very re-usable skill, for example as an upgrade of my earlier prototype of Niddy bot, answering your queries about NDIS.

What are you currently building right now?

Recently, I completed the Decluttr app prototype for the Gemini AI hackathon, designed for efficient personal item inventory management and eco-friendly re-use with christophe garrec, navan tirupathi, michal wanto, viren B.

Currently, I'm developing an AI-driven summarization pipeline for scientific papers, using LLamaindex inspired by Wikicrow's work.

Do you have an ask for readers?

If you share the same interests as me, please reach out! I’m looking for like-minded friends to share the building journey, and get inspired!

Also if you’re an expert with data agents, I’d like to learn from you and bounce ideas.

You can stay up to date with Isabelle’s builder journey by following his LinkedIn here

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