News and Blogs

• Working towards more inclusive artificial intelligence

  19th September 2023

  Gender bias in Machine Translation is not just a technical challenge, but a social, ethical, and legal one that stems from everyday communication. Through an interdisciplinary analysis Eva Vanmassenhove and her team want to contribute to more inclusive artificial intelligence.

  

• Dr. Marie Postma appointed Professor of Computational Cognitive Science

  18th July 2023

  The Executive Board of Tilburg University has appointed Dr. Marie Postma as Professor of Computational Cognitive Science effective August 1, 2023. Postma’s research focuses on improving our understanding of human cognition in support of collaboration between humans and AI systems.

  

• Improving cultural heritage accessibility with AI gets major funding

  13th July 2023

  The HAICu project of a national consortium of universities, libraries, citizens and partners from the cultural sector receives funding from the NWO as part of the National Science Agenda. The project focuses on using artificial intelligence to improve the accessibility of cultural heritage to citizens.
  

  

• Dr. ir. Roy Lindelauf appointed Professor as endowed chair of Data Science, Safety & Security

  27th June 2023

  The Board of Governors has appointed Dr. ir. Roy Lindelauf as endowed Professor of the Chair of Data Science, Safety & Security. The appointment in the Department of Cognitive Science and AI at Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, is for a period of five years, effective June 1, 2023. The chair is subsidized by the Dutch Ministry of Defense. Lindelauf, who works at this Ministry, will strengthen the faculty's fast-growing data science discipline.

  

• New TAISIG Talks online

  22nd June 2023

  TAISIG Talks #20 now online on YouTube and Spotify. Pieter Spronck, Marleen Balvert and Wouter De Baene discuss how AI can help combat hunger and the effects of poverty

  

• Tilburg University invests in Digital Sciences for Society: first € 240,000 awarded to 14 Growth Projects

  09th June 2023

  Tilburg University has awarded funding to 14 research projects for their potential to help society move forward by applying, reflecting on, or further developing digital sciences. By awarding this funding, the Digital Sciences for Society program encourages research with impact.

  

• First four MA CSAI students graduated

  24th May 2023

  On March 24, 2023, the first four students graduated from our MSc. in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence: Sander van Donkelaar, Alexis Lombard, Alberto Garcia Arroba Parrilla, and Harold Pijpelink.

  

• Synchrony Software - CSAI Researchers Develop New Tools for Studying Coordination

  15th March 2023

  Travis J. Wiltshire and his colleagues in the Cognitive Science & AI Department at Tilburg University have recently developed a software package for examining coordination. Coordination, sometimes called synchrony, happens when two or more signals, such as the heart rates of team members, align over time. Measures of synchrony allow us to look at how teams adapt to challenging situations. MultiSyncPy is an open-source software package for the Python programming language.

  

• AI for Wildlife? A sound approach

  17th February 2023

  Biodiversity is in crisis. The World Economic Forum now ranks biodiversity loss as one of humanity’s top 5 global risks. Can technology help?
  

  

• Nine Tilburg researchers receive NWO Open Competition SGW XS grant

  06th February 2023

  We congratulate Emel Öztürk, Boris van Leeuwen, David Schindler, Arjen van Lin, Sara van den Bossche, Elisabeth Huis in 't Veld, Sara Pabian, Ioana Pop and Gaëtan Mertens with this award.

  

• Go Electric! – Recent CSAI work advances electric vehicle usage

  22nd November 2022

  A paper on forecasting the availability of charging stations for electric vehicles written by CSAI researchers has been accepted for publication at this year’s BNAIC/Benelearn conference. The paper, authored by Stijn Rotman and Boris Čule, has been presented at the conference in Mechelen, Belgium, in early November, 2022.

  

• Two bachelor student teams from the CSAI program won International BCI hackathon

  11th November 2022

  For a third time in a row, two bachelor student teams from the CSAI program won the International BCI hackathon. A total of 167 participants in 38 teams took part in the BR41N.IO BCI Hackathon worldwide. This is a prestigious event in the domain of neural engineering and brain-computer interfacing where many researchers and graduate students come together to innovate in two days of intense coding. The event took place on October 9-10 (36 hours non-stop hacking). Three teams could receive an award and two of the CSAI teams were rewarded for their projects.

  

• Can you believe your eyes? Visualization of data with machine learning

  07th November 2022

  Imagine yourself as a medical expert, with a bright white doctor coat, looking at the files of patients full of fMRI and CT scans, blood measurements, ECG and EEG tests and so many more. You want to visualize the patients all in one go on your screen. The amount of data is so huge that it is called “high dimensional data”. Well, do not be scared, this is possible with machine learning algorithms (magic does not always happen at Hogwarts!). Such algorithms are called dimensionality reduction algorithms and one very famous of them is t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE). Using t-SNE, we can visualize our data on our screens and see the patterns underneath it. This is very good news especially for those of us who turn on the lights first when they get into a dark room because t-SNE is the light that we turn on when we want to visualize our big, dark room of data. But the question is do we believe in what we see when the lights are on?

  

• Spectacular Superpixels for Manageable Medical Analysis: AI as a helpful tool to analyze CT scans more effectively

  04th November 2022

  Deep learning are AI algorithms trained on lots of labelled data. A paper on a deep learning algorithm to find the pancreas shape with less labelled data will be presented at BNAIC/Benelearn conference, in Mechelen, on 8 November 2022. This work is inspired by cognitive science - how humans can learn from annotated data. This paper is co-authored by Sander van Donkelaar and Sharon Ong from Tilburg University, Lois Daamen and Paul Andel from UMC Utrecht and Ralf Zoetekouw from Datacation B.V.

  

• AI for Everyone – a new minor in Artificial Intelligence at Tilburg University

  25th May 2022

  Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences will launch a new minor for anyone who wants to stay on top of the AI developments in their chosen field of study. The minor in Artificial Intelligence is specifically designed for students with limited technical background and will be offered for the first time in the Fall semester of academic year 2022-2023. The minor welcomes students from all Bachelor's programs at Tilburg University.
  

  

• Brain Hacking at MindLabs – CSAI students carry the day in international BR41N.IO Hackathon

  04th May 2022

  Two CSAI bachelor student teams achieved a spot on the victory stage during the international BR41N.IO Hackathon this weekend. This online event takes place twice a year to great interest from the field, coinciding with the Brain Computer Interface spring school and the IEEE SMC conference in the fall. This year, 45 teams from 53 countries participated virtually in the hackathon, with many countries organizing accompanying on-site events.

  

• Engaging with Robots - Workshop and Thesis Defense by Mirjam de Haas

  14th April 2022

  On Wednesday April 20th, the CSAI department at Tilburg University hosts a workshop on engaging with robots and AI. Especially in situations where humans need to interact with robots for a longer period of time, the motivation to do so is dependent on their ongoing engagement. PhD candidate Mirjam de Haas studied this engagement as part of the Horizon 2020 L2TOR project, which is focused on robots teaching preschoolers a second language.

  

• The First of Many – publishing your first academic papers as a PhD researcher

  19th November 2021

  Since November 2020, Evy van Weelden is a PhD researcher at the Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at Tilburg University. Recently she published her first two papers, at two different scientific conferences, and presented her work at both of them. We had a chat about the first year of the PhD trajectory, interdisciplinary research, and publishing your work for the first time.

  

• From kitchen table conversations to the future of AI - The AI Forward Forum

  25th October 2021

  We all know those great conversations between friends where you set the world to rights together. You were originally just talking about a book you read recently, and suddenly the conversation turns deep and philosophical. Maybe you are outside on a warm summer evening, gazing at the stars and discussing the universe. Or maybe you are sitting cozily at the kitchen table, with a good cup of hot chocolate on a cold Dutch evening, and you talk for hours about consciousness, the human brain, and the future of artificial intelligence.

  

• The voice of the artist

  07th October 2021

  There are two women on stage. Their faces look the same, they have the same haircut and wear the same glasses. Someone from the audience asks a question. One woman starts answering in French, closely followed by the other – but although their voices are the same, the second woman is speaking English. She is also two meters tall and has a clearly mechanical body. The first woman is ORLAN, a French contemporary artist. The second is ORLANOÏDE, her robot replica. In a collaboration with Science Gallery Dublin, they present a new addition to this work at Ars Electronica Festival 2021 – the robot speaks.