Experts

Programme coordinators

Geert-Jan Houben (Delft University of Technology)

Expertise

Pro Vice Rector Magnificus Artificial Intelligence, Data and Digitalisation (PVR AI) at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

Leading the TU Delft activities in the field of AI, data and digitalisation, for education, for research and valorisation, and for relevant support. This includes the establishment of TU Delft AI Labs to promote cross-fertilisation between AI experts and scientists who use AI in their research. It also includes the representation of TU Delft in regional, national and international co-operation on this theme.

Full professor of Web Information Systems (WIS) at the Software Technology (ST) department at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

Leading a research group on Web Information Systems (WIS) and involved in the education in Computer Science in Delft, with a focus on data-based information systems on the Web.

Marcel Broersma (University of Groningen)

Expertise

Marcel Broersma is full professor of Journalism Studies and Media at the University of Groningen. He is head of the Journalism department and director of the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies. His research interests focus on the transformation of journalism, the innovation and diffusion of forms and styles of journalism, on political communication, and on local and regional journalism. He has published widely on both the history and current development of journalism in the Netherlands and comparatively.

Sally Wyatt (Maastricht University)

Expertise

I am Professor of Digital Cultures in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University. I have been studying digital technologies and their societal implications since the late 1980s, addressing questions around standardisation, the digital divide and social exclusion. More recently, my work focuses on the role of digital media in the production of knowledge (including questions around open access and collaboration), and the ways in which people incorporate the internet and social media into their practices for finding and producing health information. I am also leading the development of a new, interdisciplinary BA Digital Society, to start (subject to successful accreditation) in September 2019.

Ambitions

Ever since I first started analysing the relationships between technological and social change, I was aware that this was something that could best be accomplished by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. The socio-technical transformations underway not only affect every aspect of human activity, they also raise important challenges for research methods and the organisation of knowledge production. I would like to use my experience and understanding of the substantive questions and of interdisciplinary collaboration to enhance the collaboration between researchers and across the seven themes.

Natali Helberger (University of Amsterdam)

Expertise

Natali Helberger has been appointed professor of Information Law, with a special focus on the use of information, at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Law. Helberger researches how the role of the user of information is changing under the influence of information technology, and social and economic conditions. She also examines the resulting implications for the legal position, rights and obligations of information users under current and future media and communications law, consumer law and data protection law. Helberger’s research features a strong interdisciplinary component: in order to assess whether and how information law ties in with the reality of information users and information markets, she regularly works with communication scientists, social scientists, psychologists as well as cultural scientists and economists.

Claes de Vreese (University of Amsterdam)

Expertise

As Professor of political communication (polcomm.org) I am interested in how media and information enable citizens to participate in democratic processes. These opportunities are changing and processes of digitisation change the nature of this. Together with Natali Helberger we lead a large project on the nature and consequences of personalised communication (personalised-communication.net) as a key example of how digitisation can affect media and citizens in a democracy. I am also the Director of the Digital Communication Methods Lab (http://www.digicomlab.eu) in which we integrate novel approaches to studying the role of media and communication in a digital world.

Ambitions

The Citizenship and Democracy line in the Digital Society initiative is at the corner stone of how we organise, understand, and participate in democratic processes in a changing media and communication landscape. I hope we can pool resources and imagination in this line to make the Netherlands a leading hub for research and teaching on how all citizens can best access, use, and create information to be a citizens in a digital society.

Marcel Broersma (University of Groningen)

Expertise

Marcel Broersma is full professor of Journalism Studies and Media at the University of Groningen. He is head of the Journalism department and director of the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies. His research interests focus on the transformation of journalism, the innovation and diffusion of forms and styles of journalism, on political communication, and on local and regional journalism. He has published widely on both the history and current development of journalism in the Netherlands and comparatively.

Ton Wilthagen (Tilburg University)

Expertise

My expertise relates to labour markets, labour market and employment policy, labour relations, labour law and social security: national, international as well as regional. I am specifically interested in the relationship between on the one hand labour market dynamism and flexibilisation and social cohesion, inclusion, protection and (new) securities on the other. Is a labour market that is both dynamic and inclusive possible at all? What are sustainable labour market policies? One of the key concepts that I developed from this perspective is “flexicurity”. Regarding dynamisim I also have an interest in how new technologies, such as robotisation, influence the labour market and work. Besides research and education (among other things in the Master Labour Law and Employment Relations and the Research Master in Law Tilburg/Leuven) I am strongly engaged in generating societal impact from knowledge and science, as co-leader of the Impact Programme of Tilburg University.

Franciska de Jong (Utrecht University)

Expertise

Franciska de Jong is full professor of e-Research for the Humanties and executive director of CLARIN ERIC, the governing body of CLARIN which has its statutory seat at Utrecht University. CLARIN (Common LAnguage Resources and Technology INfrastructure) has the objective is to provide scholars in the humanities and social sciences seamless access to digital language data and processing tools all across Europe. Currently, her main research interest is in the field of access technology for digital libraries, text mining, cross-language retrieval, the disclosure of cultural heritage collections (in particular spoken audio archives), and e-research at large.

Michel Dumontier (Maastricht University)

Expertise

I am a Distinguished Professor of Data Science at Maastricht University. My research focuses on the development of computational methods for the responsible use and scalable integration of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data and services. My group combines semantic web technologies with machine learning and network analysis for drug discovery and personalized medicine. I also lead a new inter-faculty Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University whose focus is to bring together science, technology, and social, legal and ethical aspects to strengthen communities, accelerating scientific discovery, and improve health and well-being.

Ambitions

I seek to develop a transdisciplinary research and education programme that examines how data science and artificial intelligence can best be harnessed to tackle pressing issues in an increasingly digital society. A key part of my work will be to study data science methods to enhance multi-disciplinary collaboration, to create new streams of interdisciplinary education, and to identify effective means by which responsible data science research and innovative can be more tightly coupled for the benefit of a data science savvy society.

Geert-Jan Houben (Delft University of Technology)

Expertise

As a computer scientist trained in databases, my research has always been involved in how to effectively get meaningful information out of large datasets. Concentrating in particular on large sets of web data, most of my research has focussed on how to attaching meaning to web data, for example for the purpose of enabling web-based information systems to offer user-adapted or personalised information to their users. Being in the centre of data science, this means my research now is devoted to the theory and technology that enables developers and users of data-driven systems to trust the information that the systems provide.

Ambitions

With the Digital Society programme, we can increase the awareness of how data science plays a fundamental role in many of the various research efforts in studying the Digital Society. As joint universities, we can further develop the research around data science to reach that all research that applies large data sets and data science can effectively rely on the insights derived from the data and that thus all researchers that apply data science can do so in a responsible manner.

Frank van Harmelen (VU Amsterdam)

Expertise

Frank van Harmelen is a professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the Computer Science department (Faculty of Science) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Since 2000, he has played a leading role in the development of the Semantic Web, which aims to make data on the web semantically interpretable by machines through formal representations. He was co-PI on the first European Semantic Web project (OnToKnowledge, 1999), which laid the foundations for the Web Ontology Language OWL. OWL has become a worldwide standard, it is in wide commercial use, and has become the basis for an entire research community. In recent years, he pioneered the development of large scale reasoning engines. He was scientific director of the 10m euro EU-funded Large Knowledge Collider, a platform for distributed computation over semantic graphs with billions of edges. The prize-winning work with his student Jacopo Urbani has improved the state of the art by two orders of magnitude. He is scientific director of The Network Institute. In this interdisciplinary research institute some 150 researchers from the Faculties of Social Science, Humanities and Computer Science collaborate on research topics in computational Social Science and e-Humanities. He is a guest professor at the University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China.

Mykola Pechenizkiy (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Expertise

Mykola Pechenizkiy is a Full Professor at the department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), where he holds the Data Mining Chair. His research interests include data science, knowledge discovery and data mining, responsible analytics, including ethics/discrimination-awareness, context-aware predictive analytics, handling concept drift and reoccurring contexts, automation of feature construction and analytics on evolving networks. His core expertise and research interests are in predictive analytics and knowledge discovery from evolving data, and in their application to real-world problems in industry, medicine and education. At the Data Science Center Eindhoven, he leads the Customer Journey interdisciplinary research program aiming at developing techniques for informed and responsible analytics.

Corien Prins (Tilburg University)

Expertise

Corien Prins is Professor of Law and Information Technology at Tilburg Law School and was president of the Tilburg Institute of Law, Technology, and Society (TILT). Since 2017, she is Chair of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR)

Since 2009 she has been a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Chair of the Supervisory Board of Erasmus University Rotterdam and a member of the selection Advisory Committee of the parquet of the Supreme Court.

Linnet Taylor (Tilburg University)

Expertise

Linnet Taylor is Assistant Professor of Data Ethics, Law and Policy at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT). Her research focuses on global data justice – the development of a conceptual framework for the ethical and beneficial governance of data technologies based on insights from technology users and providers around the world.

 

 

Christof Monz (University of Amsterdam)

Expertise

Christof Monz is an associate professor in computer science at the
Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, where he leads the Language Technology Lab. His research interests lie in the area of multilingual natural language processing and neural machine translation in particular. He was awarded an NWO Vidi grant to work on generative aspects of machine translation. Christof studied Computational Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam. After working as a post-doc at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, and as a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, UK, he returned to the University of Amsterdam.

 

Andrea Evers (Leiden University)

Expertise

Andrea Evers is professor of Health Psychology and chair of the Health-Medical-and-Neuropsychology-Unit at Leiden University. After her PhD (cum laude), Andrea Evers obtained several personal grants for excellent researchers (NWO-Veni 2004, NWO-Vidi 2009, ERC Consolidator Grant 2013, ERC Proof of Concept 2015, NWO-Vici 2017) for her innovative, interdisciplinary and translational research on psychoneurobiological mechanisms and treatments for health and disease. Her research is characterized by a strong interdisciplinary focus, particularly due to connecting Social Sciences with Biomedical and Life Sciences, in addition to collaborations with Neuroscience and Humanities. In addition to her broad clinical and teaching experience, she uniquely combines fundamental and applied science in her translational research, by focusing both on basic research on psychoneurobiology (e.g. stress mechanisms) and translational research on screening and innovative interventions for somatic conditions (e.g. e-health tools). She published more than 200 international and national articles in her research topics.

Within the VSNU program Digital Society, she is one of the national chairs of the program Health & Well-being and connects her activities to several other initiatives. For example, as part of the Dutch National Science Agenda (NWA), she is one of the chairs (“boegbeeld”) of the route NeurolabNL. Moreover, she is also one of the chairs of the eHealth program as part of Medical Delta program within the LDE (Leiden, Delft, Erasmus Universities) collaboration. She is also co-chair of the profile area Health, Prevention and the Human Life Cycle, at Leiden University and Leiden University Medical Centre. Her research is also closely connected to clinical practice as part of her work as a Clinical Psychologist within the Leiden University Treatment and Expert Centre (LUBEC) of the Faculty of Social Science.

She has a very broad experience as researcher and therapist within the area of self-management for a variety of chronic somatic conditions and developed, evaluated and implemented a large variety of disease-generic and specific screening and treatment protocols that can be individually applied through the internet (ehealth). The main aim of her eHealth and self-management research programme is to optimize health care for a wide variety of patient groups by developing, evaluating, and implementing online screening instruments and self-management interventions that can be tailored to individual needs. The research programme encompasses a broad variety of projects developing and testing the effectiveness of digital screening instruments to select subjects at risk and offer them tailored interventions (e.g. online self-management interventions for patients at risk for adjustments problems to a chronic condition) using various applications (e.g. apps, games, e-coaching, virtual reality).

Hermie Hermens (University of Twente)

Expertise

Prof. Dr. Ir. Hermie J. Hermens did his master in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Twente. His PhD was on surface EMG modelling, processing and clinical applications. He became Professor in Neuromuscular Control at the University of Twente. He was the initiator and coordinator of the SENIAM project, which had a substantial impact as it resulted in a broadly accepted worldwide standard on surface EMG electrodes properties and their placement on the muscles.

Hermie was co-founder of Roessingh Research and Development (RRD), originating from the Roessingh Rehabilitation Centre, which has grown now in the largest institute in the area of Rehabilitation Technology and Telemedicine in the Netherlands. He was also one of the initiators of the Center for Care Technology Research (CCTR), where he is now director Technology, being one of the 8 Centres of Research Excellence (CoRE’s) of the Innovative Medical Devices Initiative (IMDI).

He gradually switched his research area from Rehabilitation Technology towards combining Biomedical Engineering with ICT to create innovative remote monitoring and coaching services for people with chronic conditions. In 2008, he became professor Telemedicine and head of the Telemedicine research group, at UTwente, in 2010 he became director Telemedicine at RRD and visiting professor of the Caledonian University in Glasgow. Hermie is (co)-author of over 300 peer reviewed scientific journal papers, and many more congress publications, reflected in a high H-index (59) and over 16000 citations of his work.

He coordinated three European projects and participated in over 25 other international projects in the area of Rehabilitation Technology and Telemedicine. The present focus of his research involves smart automatic coaching systems using on-body sensing and personalised feedback, and intelligent context aware systems/services that support independent living of people with chronic conditions.

Presently, Hermie is coordinating the H2020 project Council of Coaches, focusing on disruptive new way of coaching using multiple artificial coaches and the recently funded Data2person project EDIC (exceptional and deep intelligent coach). He is the coordinator of the UT wide multidisciplinary research program on “Personalised eHealth technology”. Within the VSNU program Digital Society, he is one of the national chairs of the program Health and Well-Being.

Lisette Van Gemert-Pijnen (University of Twente)

Expertise

Lisette Van Gemert-Pijnen is Professor of Persuasive Health Technology. The research and tuition conducted by Lisette van Gemert focuses on the design, implementation and evaluation of technology in the healthcare sector with the aim of improving the overall quality of health and safety. The research in particular is oriented towards human-centered and value-driven technology and includes three subthemes: user centered development, persuasive technology design, and business modelling (implementation). Research is part of the Persuasive Health Technology lab, Research center of the Center for eHealth &Wellbeing Research at the University of Twente.

Aarnout Brombacher (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Expertise

Aarnout Brombacher is Full Professor of Design Theory and Information Flow Analysis. Brombacher has an interest in field-data analysis of complex systems in interaction with users and user communities, data analytics and the resulting customer perceived design quality models. His early career at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) focused on quality and reliability management, both in the Department of Industrial Design and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He has extensive experience in industrial quality and reliability improvement projects and developing tools and analysis methods for this field. Later, his interests shifted to sports, activity and human health, using the increasingly available amounts of individual activity data to help create opportunities for more people to become active. He is currently member of the National TopTeam (advisory body of the Dutch government) on Sports and Vitality representing the 14 Dutch universities in this field.

André Dekker (Maastricht University)

Expertise

I am a full professor of Clinical Data Science at Maastricht University and lead the GROW-Maastricht University research division of MAASTRO Knowledge Engineering. My research focuses on three main themes: building global data sharing infrastructures;
machine learning cancer outcome prediction models from this data; applying outcome prediction models to improve lives of cancer patients. Our scientific breakthrough has been the development of a data sharing and distributed learning infrastructure that does not require data to leave the hospital. This has reduced many of the ethical and other barriers to share health data. We have shown this approach works in more than 20 cancer centres worldwide.

Edith Feskens (Wageningen University & Research)

Epertise

Professor in Nutrition and Health over the Lifecourse.

Natasha Maurits (University of Groningen)

Expertise

Natasha Maurits, PhD, is full professor of Clinical Neuroengineering at the department of Neurology of the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands, as well as Chief Scientific Information Officer (CSIO), heading the section Information Management for Research, Education and Training of UMCG. She is also visiting professor at the department of Biomedical Engineering of Strathclyde University in Glasgow (UK). Her research focuses on clinical neuroengineering, in particular biomedical signal analysis, multimodal neuroimaging, high-density EEG recording, visualization of high-dimensional data and home-based diagnosis with applications in neurology (movement disorders, neuromuscular disorders, dementia, stroke, trauma) and cognition (healthy ageing, dyslexia).

She has published more than 130 international peer-reviewed papers and published two books (From neurology to methodology and back: an introduction to clinical neuroengineering (2012) and Math for scientists: refreshing the essentials (2017), both with Springer). Furthermore, she is a senior member of IEEE, Academic Editor of PLoS ONE, board member of the Dutch Neurofederation (until 2018), member of the Advisory Board of the School of Mathematics of the University of Groningen (UoG), and member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lincoln School of Mathematics and Physics (UK).

Within the VSNU program Digital Society, Health & Well-being, she represents the UMCG/RuG with a specific focus on topics such as Healthy Ageing, e-Health and hospital at home (H@H). From her perspective as CSIO of UMCG she is very interested in the GO FAIR initiative, personal health environments, (medical and care) data coupling and sharing and its ethical and legal implications.

Heleen Riper (VU Amsterdam)

Expertise

Heleen Riper is Professor of eMental-Health and works at the VU University Amsterdam, GGZ inGeest (Research Department of a large mental health service organization in Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and at the Leuphana University (eMental-Health Research Centre), Lüneburg, Germany. Over the past 15 years her research focus has been on the development of eMental-Health interventions for common mental disorders and substance use disorders, the assessment of their clinical and cost-effectiveness and their implementation in routine practice. In addition, I have studied the requirements and impact of eMental-Health on both national and international health policy-levels. The scope of her current research activities includes the innovative use of mobile health, social media and blended care for the prevention and treatment of common mental disorders. New methodological challenges include the use and evaluation of mobile ecological momentary assessments and interventions, serious gaming for mental health and intelligent reasoning systems for modeling the virtual patient.

Margriet Sitskoorn (Tilburg University)

Expertise

Margriet Sitskoorn is a full professor of Clinical Neuropsychology (Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology) at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and is registered as a Clinical Neuropsychologist, Specialist BIG-registration (49050992625). She is the Health & Wellbeing programme leader from Tilburg University’s Impact programme. Within the VSNU Digital Society programme Health & Wellbeing, she represents Tilburg University with a specific focus on cognition, personalised care and creating data from both big- and experience data within the field of Health and Wellbeing.

Margriet Sitskoorn worked as a clinical neuropsychologist and cognitive scientist at several institutes in the Netherlands and stayed at Henry Ford Hospital Detroit, USA. Sitskoorn has received and continues to be awarded multiple grants from different organisations (e.g. ZonMw, KWF, Fonds Nuts Ohra, Czfonds). She was, amongst others a member of the Dutch Health Council’s Special Committee electromagnetic fields, a board member of STT foresight images of the brain, and is a member of the Supervisory board of the Dutch TopSportCommunity of the Netherlands. She also functions as a consulting editor for the peer-reviewed scientific journal Neuropsychology.

Sitskoorn has published around 150 international and national articles, books and book chapters to date and her books are translated into several languages. Her main scientific interest is in experience-based neuroplasticity. This research focuses on the potential to regulate and capitalise on neuroplasticity in the human brain using cognitive, environmental and behavioural stimulation. The goal is to improve cognitive and emotional functioning not only in patients with neurological disorders but also in healthy people. An example of her work is the Predict and Recover project, a large scale, multi-study research programme that focuses on the cause, prediction and treatment of cognitive dysfunctions in patients with brain tumours. This project is multicenter  conducted over many disciplines, takes a plethora of variables into account and is funded by several organisations.

Sitskoorn is also interested in translating insights gained from scientific brain research into language accessible to the public at large and in integrating scientific knowledge into the field of education, policy making and business. She is the author of several bestsellers, participates in several television programmes, and she writes for several popular magazines in addition to her peer-reviewed scientific articles. She is also a frequently invited key-note speaker.

Harold Bekkering (Radboud University)

Expertise

Harold Bekkering is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour of the Radboud University Nijmegen. His research has covered many different ways of learning ranging from basic sensorimotor learning to complex forms of social learning. Lately, he aims to implement knowledge about human learning in educational settings.

Marcus Specht (Open University)

Expertise

Marcus Specht is Director at the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Education and Learning (CEL) and Professor to the Chair of Digital Education at TU Delft’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS). Professor Specht was previously head of the Welten Institute’s research group on Technology Enhanced Learning. The Welten Institute is the research centre for learning, teaching and technology of the Open University. Professor Specht will continue to work at the Institute as a researcher, thus assuring the exchange of academic knowledge with the Centre for Education and Learning.

With my background in psychology and engineering I have always been researching the interaction between humans and technology. Empowering humans with technology to learn more efficient, effective or by having fun and enjoying themselves while learning is the big challenge for the next hundred years of digital education. I have approached new opportunities from a design-based reach perspective and developed new technology applications for education and I also evaluated technology for enabling better human learning. Beside empowering more efficient human learning also the impact of technology on processes as information distribution, educational monitoring and formative assessment, and development of educational material has been part of my research.

Ambitions

Enabling new forms of digital learning and education and to understand what works best and in which context is essential knowledge for the future of human learning. I strive towards an integrative but still focused research approach on how to make human learning visible, build and design enabling technologies and work on better and flexible learning support for individuals, groups, and organisations.

Max Louwerse (Tilburg University)

Expertise

Max Louwerse is Professor Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence at Tilburg University. He received his PhD in Linguistics (University of Edinburgh) and worked at the University of Memphis as Full Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Intelligent Systems, where he also worked as Director. Louwerse published over 120 articles in journals, proceedings and books in cognitive science, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics (text and discourse, multimodal communication, embodied cognition, medical informatics, and spatio-temporal models) and holds two patents. Louwerse was founder of the DAF Technology Lab, the virtual and mixed reality lab on the Tilburg University campus, was involved in setting up the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (www.jads.nl) and is co-founder of Mind Labs (www.mind-labs.eu).

Marleen Huysman (VU Amsterdam)

Expertise

I am professor at the School of Business and Economics (SBE) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In my research I study the, often unintended, consequences of digital technologies for how we work and organise. I study socio-technical practices to understand how our traditional ideas about organising work are challenged in our digital society. A hallmark of the research at my group (www.kinresearch.nl) is that we create understanding of the development and use of digital technologies by studying these processes in practice, working in close collaboration with organisations.

Ambitions

It is my ambition to help the Netherlands develop into a human-centric socially responsible digital economy. In order to reach this, I will strive to create a research community of interdisciplinary researchers on human-centric digital innovation related to work and organization. I will foster close collaboration between this academic community and organisations to ensure true impact of our research, which contributes to a responsible, sustainable and meaningful future of work and organising.

Tanja van der Lippe (Utrecht University)

Expertise

Tanja van der Lippe is Professor of Sociology of Households and Employment Relations at the Department of Sociology and Research School (ICS) of Utrecht University, head of the Department of Sociology and research director ICS Utrecht. Her research interests are in the area of work-family linkages in Dutch and other societies, for which she received a number of large scale grants from Dutch and European Science Foundations. She is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW, 2014), and of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW, 2013). She has published extensively on work and care of men and women, time use and time pressure in a comparative way, and the position of men and women on the labor market (including supervisory positions) in Western and Eastern European countries.

Frits Claassen (Wageningen University & Research)

Expertise

Frits Claassen is Associate Professor at the Operations Research and Logistics Group. My research aims to contribute particularly to the applicability of Operations Research (OR) models – and solution techniques in practice. My general research objective is to combine the strong elements of normative OR models (i.e. what practice ought to do) with descriptive decision-making (i.e. what practice actually does), such that models and solution approaches arise that provide for insights in what practice should, and actually can do.

Liesbet van Zoonen (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Expertise

Academic director of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Big Open and Linked Data (BOLD) Cities. Our agenda concerns the responsible application of data science for public values and the public good in urban environments. This involves anything from smart mobility solutions to data driven benefit systems. As a matter of principle, we collaborate with local government, creative professionals and citizen groups. We designed the SHARED values as a criterion for human centred information technology, and use this in our own research to assess if and how data science projects in the city serve the benefits of the city and its citizens.

Ambitions

There are loads of small and big research projects about the digitisation and datafication of cities. Many cities pride themselves on being ‘smart’. However, to date there is little exchange between the plethora of initiatives, there is little insight in best practice, let alone that scaling and spreading can be considered. Our aim with the ‘Digital Cities and Communities’ theme of the VSNU agenda is to scope existing research, labs, experiments and try-outs, build an ‘observatory’ to monitor future work and establish mechanism for spreading and scaling that are relevant to all partners of the quadruple helix, i.e. knowledge institutes, (local) governments, creative industry and civil society.

Herbert Bos (VU Amsterdam)

Expertise

Herbert Bos is full professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and leads the VUSec Systems Security research group. He obtained an ERC Starting Grant to work on reverse engineering and an NWO VICI grant to work on vulnerability detection. These and other systems security topics are still close to his heart. Other research interests include OS design, networking, and dependable systems. Herbert moved to The Netherlands after approximately four years at the Universiteit Leiden. Before that he obtained his Ph.D. from the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, followed by a brief stint at KPN Research (now TNO Telecom).

Bart Jacobs (Radboud University)

Expertise

Professor of Software Security and Correctness, Digital Security Group, Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen. My research concentrates on theoretical and practical aspects of security. On the theoretical side, my focus is on quantum logic and probabilistic computation, supported by an ERC Advanced Grant, see also the EfProb Python library for probabilistic computation. On the practical side, I’m interested in identity and privacy management, see eg. the IRMA project and video on attribute-based authentication, in security and privacy in personalised medicine (see the PEP technology), and in cyber security and intelligence and the broader societal aspects of computer security.

Michel van Eeten (Delft University of Technology)

Expertise

Professor of Public Administration, in particular the governance of infrastructures in the Policy, Organisation, Law and Gaming section. I am also the director of the TPM Graduate School, which is currently being set up. My current research focuses on a variety of topics, most notably the governance of infrastructures, internet security, high reliability organizations, and multi-actor networks. I lecture about these and other topics at Delft University of Technology and at the Netherlands School of Public Administration in The Hague, an institute providing executive education for Dutch public sector officials.

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