ILLC News & Events

The field of Artificial Intelligence is blossoming, with many technical advances in natural language processing, music processing, automated reasoning and other fields, often based on big data and machine learning. Increasingly, these techniques are also finding their way to applications used by companies, institutions and citizens, and hence they are having a direct impact on society. With increased power and frequent usage comes extra responsibility: are technical advances sufficiently informed by real needs in society? Are they accompanied by safeguards regarding malicious use? Are they offering the transparency needed to inform stakeholders about decisions based on these systems?

We are looking for an ambitious researcher, deeply familiar with the technical details of current AI systems but also seriously committed to improving their responsible use, for instance by improving transparency and explainability and/or by addressing undesirable biases and irresponsible use. You will work together with the strong group of Artificial Intelligence researchers at the ILLC, and more broadly at the University of Amsterdam, including through the University’s Research Priority Area Human(e) AI.

Are you a high potential young researcher with a PhD degree in Logic, Linguistics, Philosophy, Computational Linguistics, or a related discipline, and would you be interested to join the Logic and Language programme at our institute to investigate Linguistic Interpretation Interpretation as Abduction? If so, we invite you to apply for this position.

This postdoc position is part of the NWO Open Competition project 'A Sentence Uttered Makes a World Appear---Natural Language Interpretation as Abductive Model Generation'. The successful applicant will join the group of Reinhard Muskens. The aim of the project is to explore how semantic values are assigned to natural language expressions in a compositional way and how the resulting values, represented as logical expressions, are subsequently enriched by means of abductive reasoning. The latter is studied in a tableaux setting.

We are pleased to announce that Bas Cornelissen has won a best paper award at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval conference (virtually) in Montréal.

You can look at the paper, poster, and a very nice 4-minute video
introduction here: https://program.ismir2020.net/poster_6-13.html.

The European Network for the Philosophy of Language and Mind (PLM) organizes a workshop on Delusion in Language and Mind at the ILLC/University of Amsterdam, October 23--24.

The workshop includes 8 presentations on the subject plus detailed commentaries on the papers, both by expert members of the network. The workshop will be held on-line and on-location, if the situation permits.