Willem Zuidema (a.k.a. Jelle) is associate professor of Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam and research fellow of the national Language In Interaction consortium. Before joining ILLC in 2004, he worked at the University of Edinburgh (2002-2004), where he completed his PhD thesis on “The Major Transitions in the Evolution of Language”. He also worked at Sony Computer Science Laboratory - Paris (2000), the AI lab of the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, (2000-2002), and in the Behavioural Biology group at Leiden University (2007-2008).
Oskar van der Wal is a PhD candidate advised by Jelle Zuidema and Katrin Schulz. His research focuses on detecting social biases found in NLP models, such as gender bias and racism, and understanding how these biases are learnt from text. As part of the Bias Barometer project he investigates what these NLP models can teach us about our own biases and those in digital media.
The topic of my PhD is centered around the fields of NLP, interpretability, and linguistics. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the current successes of the state of the art in NLP. My research is guided by hypotheses derived from linguistics, that I evaluate on deep neural models using techniques from the field of Explainable AI.
Samira Abnar obtained her Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Tehran. Her main interest lies in the field of Cognitive Modeling. During her PhD, she investigates biologically plausible neural network models which simulate how humans learn and develop language.
Why do humans make music, and how do they do it? Why are we a musical species? These are the questions that motivate my research. I use computational methods to study how musical traditions differ. Mapping the diversity of musics across the globe, is a key step in understanding the cultural evolution of musics.
Marianne de Heer Kloots is a student in the MSc Artificial Intelligence and the MSc Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Lucia Liu is a student in the MSc Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Marta Radzikowska is a student in the MSc Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Raquel Alhama completed her PhD in our lab in 2017 with a focus on Artificial Grammar Learning. Today, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.
Raquel Fernandez is an associate professor and the head of the Dialogue Modelling Group at the ILLC. She researches computational semantics and pragmatics with a special focus on linguistic interaction.
Ivan Titov is an associate professor at the University of Edinburgh and affiliated with the ILLC . His research focuses on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.
Tejaswini Deoskar is an assistant professor at Utrecht University, investigating probabilistic language models. In particular, she focuses on semi-supervised language learning techniques.
Henkjan Honing leads the Music Cognition Group at the University of Amsterdam. His research aims to identify the cognitive and biological mechanisms underlying musicality, as well as the commonalities and differences in the processing of music and language.