24 November 2023

Looking back at Amsterdam AI Highlights Event

The day after, how good that feels. Yesterday evening the Amsterdam AI network came together to listen to a great keynote by Piek Vossen, an update on the current state of affairs within Amsterdam AI, to say goodbye to the Management team of Amsterdam Data Science, and finally, to congratulate the winners of the Amsterdam AI Thesis Awards and offer them a stage.

During the walk-in at 4:15 PM, the hall filled itself with Amsterdam AI partners, students and companies. Slowly the evening started and when the clock ticked 4:35 PM Cees Snoek (scientific director of Amsterdam AI) opened the evening with an update on where we stand within the organization and what our goals are for 2024! In April he announced we will be organizing a grand Career Fair called AI020, so keep your eyes and ears open!

Furthermore, Piek Vossen led us through a 30-minute lecture on 'Meaning in a multilingual language model'. Following this, Anita Nijboer took the opportunity to thank the management team of Amsterdam Data Science for their work, namely Lynda Hardman (CWI), Jaap Heringa (VU), Marc Salomon (VU ABS) and Pascal Wiggers (HvA CoEAAI). Together Amsterdam Data Science has built an incredibly strong network on which Amsterdam AI can now continue to grow and we thank them for that! At 5:25 PM, Lise Stork (VU) and Viktoriya Degeler (VU) took the floor as the Selection Committee of the Amsterdam AI Thesis Awards to congratulate the winners and introduce each one.

De BSc winners are:
- Derck Prinzhorn, Supervisor: Alexander Timans (UvA) and his Thesis title: Benchmarking conformal prediction methods for time series regression

- Corinna Triebold, Supervisors: Anil Yaman (VU) and her Thesis title: Enhancing Generalisability of Evolved Neural Network Controllers

De MSc winners are:
- Samantha Visbeek, Supervisors: Erman Acar (UvA), Floris den Hengst (VU), and her Thesis title: Deep Symbolic Classification for Fraud Detection
- Piyush Bagad, Cees Snoek (UvA), Andrew Zisserman (University of Oxford), Makarand Tapaswi (IIIT Hyderabad, India) and his Thesis title: It’s About Time: Time Awareness in Video Foundation Models

Congratulations on your win on behalf of the entire Amsterdam AI team, the Steering Committee, Elsevier, Prosus and Data Science Center.

We would also like to thank the Steering Committee of the Amsterdam AI Thesis Awards 2023: [co-chair] Viktoriya Degeler (University of Amsterdam), [co-chair] Lise Stork (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Nanne van Noord (University of Amsterdam), Giovanni Sileno (University of Amsterdam), Benno Kruit (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Romana Pernisch (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Dimitris Tzionas (University of Amsterdam), Andrew Yates (University of Amsterdam), Hamed Seiied Alavi (University of Amsterdam), Ana Oprescu (University of Amsterdam), Madelon Hulsebos (University of Amsterdam), Mohammad Alian Nejadi (University of Amsterdam), Zhiming Zhao - University of Amsterdam, Anil Yaman - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Emma Beauxis-Aussalet - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Shujian Yu (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Xander Wilcke (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Floris Den Hengst (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Taraneh Younesian (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Ilaria Tiddi (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Margherita Martorana (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Matthijs Jansen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Erkan Karabulut (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Ilias Gerostathopoulos (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Jesse Donkervliet (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Patrick Koopmann (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Atefeh Keshavarzi Zafarghandi (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Kousar Aslam (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Vincent Francois (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).