Stephan Raaijmakers

POSITION: PROFESSOR | COMMUNICATIVE AI TNO UNIT: ICT, DATA SCIENCE DEPARTMENT UNIVERSITY: LEIDEN UNIVERSITY, LUCL (LEIDEN UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR LINGUISTICS)   TNO LOCATION: DEN HAAG, ANNA VAN BUERENPLEIN 1 EMAIL: [email protected] TEL: +31628248531

RESEARCH AREA

The chair addresses communicative AI: AI that is open for inspection by humans and engages in communicative interfaces with humans. The chair focuses in particular on deep learning and natural language processing. It emphasizes the explainability and auditability of human-centered AI, and explicitly seeks connection with neurocognition, neuro/-psycholinguistics and general linguistics - disciplines that resort under LUCL. Further, the chair enforces the connection with LIACS (Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science) and the digital humanities community in Leiden (LUCDH, Leiden University Center for Digital Humanities) and the Netherlands. The professorship reflects TNO's orientation on trustworthy, transparent and controllable AI and will contribute to a better knowledge position for TNO on human-AI interaction.

RECENT RESULTS

In 2020, work focused on creating a synergetic research environment in Leiden. A number of collaborations between TNO and Leiden University have been initiated:

1. Main applicant of a research proposal dealing with the detection of misinformation, disinformation around Covid, together with Leiden (LIACS and LUCL), University of Groningen, TNO and Dutch ministries. (NWO Covid 2^nd Wave call). The proposal made it to the final stage but was not granted.
2. Main applicant of a follow-up proposal addressing a national infrastructure for misinformation, disinformation and misrepresentation (NWO Perspectief, PPS), with a wide array of partners (including the research partners of the Covid proposal) from security, government, media and industry. Conversational agents play a role as facilities for debating news quality (human-AI interaction). Under evaluation.
3. The organization of SAILS workshops and hackathons, with anticipated participation of TNO.
4. The involvement of Leiden and TNO in the Appl.AI program (under construction).
5. Setting up an AI-based conversational agent pilot project with the ICT Helpdesk of Leiden University, industry and TNO (in progress).

Additionally, the chair has become involved in the organization of the European City of Science 2022, and the EuroScience Open Forum conference (submitting and reviewing Faculty of Humanities proposals for workshops).

The inaugural lecture for the chair has been prepared and was originally scheduled for December 2020, but was unfortunately cancelled due to covid restrictions.

PHD SUPERVISION

• A PhD student to be supervised (as promotor) by the chair, under the SAILS program, has been hired; supervision starts in January 2021. Co-supervision with LIACS.

TOP PUBLICATIONS

• Brewster, C., Nouwt, B., Raaijmakers, S., & Verhoosel, J. (n.d.). “Ontology-based access control for FAIR data”. Data Intelligence, 2(2020), 66–77.
• Stephan Raaijmakers. “Deep learning for natural language processing”. Manning publications,
• Raaijmakers, S., & Brewster, C. “Exploiting Ontologies for Deep Learning: A Case for Sentiment Mining”. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Semantic Systems, Posters and demo track, 2018.
• Raaijmakers, S., Sappelli, M., & Kraaij, W. “Investigating the interpretability of hidden layers in deep text mining”. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on Semantic Systems, pp. 177-180, 2017.

LINKS

LinkedIn: https://nl.linkedin.com/stephanraaijmakers