Professional Activities

(Contact me for a full C.V.)

In a nutshell, my long-term goal is to understand how intelligent beings are able to learn how to couple (visual) perception to action in intuitive, efficient, effective and principled way. This has to do with experimentation, lots of data and high level knowledge representation to represent the the whole process. In addition, I want to understand the consequences of such intelligent algorithms for how society works.

Before OU, I was an assistant professor artificial intelligence at Tilburg University, in the cognitive science and artificial intelligence (CSAI) department. I contributed to the teaching in the AI programme, see bachelor and master, and also in the data science in society master. Education-wise and research-wise I was affiliated with the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science in Den Bosch, which is a data-science hot spot of the universities of Eindhoven and Tilburg and local/regional governments and companies. I was part of the computational sensemaking lab which is based both in CSAI and JADS.

Before Tilburg, I was working at the Vrije Universiteit (VU), in the Knowledge, Information and Innovation (KIN) group of the faculty of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration (FEWEB). In that group I am part of the Amsterdam Center for Business Analytics (ACBA) in which Mathematics and Computer Science and Business Administration come together, and I'm also affiliated with Data Science Alkmaar (DSA). Overall, I'm a data science researcher working in the Amsterdam Academic Alliance Data Science (AAA-DS) which is a joint research programme from Uva, VU and Hva.

Between 2011 and 2014 I finished a three-year period as a teacher in the Artificial intelligence group at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands

Before, I was working as a postdoc in the DTAI group (machine learning subgroup) at the Computer Science department of the KU. Leuven (Belgium). I coordinated whe Leuven part of the EU robotics project First-MM project for a while.

In a previous life, I was a PhD. student, working for the Human Media Interaction group (aka SETI, Parlevink and TKI) of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. I am/was a member of the SIKS research school. I was a member of the late discussion group Emergentia. People involved in my PhD studies outside Twente were Marco Wiering and John-Jules Meyer from the Intelligent Systems Group at the Utrecht University Computer Science Department. In 2004 I stayed at the Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Lab in Freiburg, Germany.Contact Information

Here are some of the activities that have to do with the scientific community:

Phd committee memberships

Member of PhD thesis committees of Sam Sarjant (2012/2013, New Zealand), Parisa Kordjamshidi (2013, Belgium), and Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar (2012, The Netherlands), Bogdan Moldovan (Belgium, 2015), and Steffen Michels (2016, The Netherlands).

Member of the Programme Committee of

The 12th Benelux Conference on Machine Learning (BeNeLearn-2002)
The 13th Benelux Conference on Machine Learning (BeNeLearn-2004 )
The 4th International Symposium on Robotics and Automation (ISRA-2004 )
The 5th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA-2005 )
The European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML06-PKDD-06 )
The 15th Benelux Conference on Machine Learning (BeNeLearn-2006 )
The European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML/PKDD-2007 )
The 16th Benelux Conference on Machine Learning (BeNeLearn-2007 )
Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC-2008)
European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL-2008)
Benelux Conference on Machine Learning (Benelearn-2008)
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-2009)
European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML-2009)
Benelux Conference on Machine Learning (Benelearn-2009)
Member of the Technical Committee of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN-2008)
AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2010)
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-2010)
European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML-2010)
Benelux Conference on Machine Learning (Benelearn-2010)
Benelux Conference on Machine Learning (Benelearn-2011)
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'11)
European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL-2011)
International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM-2012)
European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2012)
Machine Learning for Interactive Systems Workshop at ECAI 2012
Symposium on Adaptive Dynamic Programming (ADPRL-13)
European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL-2012)
COSLI-3: satellite workshop on Computational Models of Spatial Language at the 10th International Conference on Computational Semantics in Potsdam
Benelearn 2013 - Benelux conference on machine learning
SARA 2013 - International Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation
IJCAI 2013 - Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence
European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML-2013, journal track)
BNAIC 2013 Benelux conference on artificial intelligence
BENELEARN 2014 - Benelux conference on machine learning
European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2014) (senior program committee)
Symposium on Adaptive Dynamic Programming (ADPRL-14)
International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM-2014)
AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2015)
International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM-2015) BENELEARN 2015 - Benelux conference on machine learning
Symposium on Adaptive Dynamic Programming (ADPRL-15)
IJCAI 2015 - Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence
European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML-2015)
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-2015)
European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2014)
BNAIC 2016 Benelux conference on artificial intelligence
European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2016)
IJCAI 2016 - Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence
BENELEARN 2017 - Benelux conference on machine learning
European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML-2017)
IJCAI 2017 - Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence
BNAIC 2017 Benelux conference on artificial intelligence
AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2018)
ICAPS International Conference on Automated Planning Systems (ICAPS-2018)
Reviewing for ERC (2016) and ESF (2017, panel on risk and technology)
Recognized as outstanding reviewer for Artificial Intelligence journal (Elsevier) in August 2017
AAAI-2019, The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
ICAPS-2019 (Learning&Planning Track)
ICML 2019

Program Chair of

The 14th Benelux Conference on Machine Learning (BeNeLearn-2005 )

Program co-Chair of

The International Workshop on Rich Representations for Reinforcement Learning at the International Conference on Machine Learning (RRfRL-2005)

The 19th Benelux conference on Machine LearningLeuven, Belgium (2010)

IJCAI Workshop on Machine Learning for Interactive Systems (MLIS'13): Bridging the Gap between Perception, Action and Communication, Bejing, China

AAAI Workshop on Machine Learning for Interactive Systems (MLIS'14): Bridging the Gap between Perception, Action and Communication, at AAAI-2014, Montreal Canada

ICML Workshop on Machine Learning for Interactive Systems (MLIS'15): Bridging the Gap between Perception, Action and Communication, at ICML-2015, Montreal Canada, published as JMLR proceedings

 

Additional Reviewing, many articles for conferences and journals. In the past year (2016/2017) for example for MLJ, JAIR, JMLR, AIJ, etc.

Reviewing for (a.o) BeNeLearn'02, BeNeLearn'04, IVA'03,BNAIC'03,Machine Learning Journal,ILP'04, ECML'04,JELIA'04,ICONIP'04,Discovery Science('04),AISB SYMPOSIUM (Mind-Minding Agents), BeNeLearn'05, IJCAI'05, IVA'05, BNAIC'06, IJCAI'07, ALAMAS'07, Journal of Computer Science and Technology , BICTA'07, NIPS'07, BNAIC'08, Benelearn'08, EWRL'08, NIPS'08, SUM'08, ICJAI'09, JAIR, Journal of AI Review, NIPS'09 (emergency reviewer), 3dRR workshop at ICCV, ICLP'10, Informatica, Artificial Intelligence, UAI11, JAIR, JMLR, TPLP, Bestuurskunde, NeuroComputing, TNNLS, ACM TiiS, and all the conferences in the above.