The Master's course How Music Works: Inside the Musical Mind by Makiko Sadakata is the winner of the Humanities Education Award 2026. Congratulations!
Dennis Ulmer was awarded the honorable mention for the dissertation award from the Association for Computational Linguistic for his dissertation On Uncertainty In Natural Language Processing (you can read it here). Congratulations!
Makiko Sadataka has won the NWO funding for her project Towards the Auditory Aesthetic Aha: exploring how our brain rewards discovering music in sounds. Congratulations!
Abstract
Imagine a jumble of black-and-white patches that suddenly reveals a face and feels meaningful. Moments like this, when something confusing suddenly makes sense, are often surprisingly pleasurable. This project explores whether similar moments also occur when we listen to sound, for example, when repeated speech unexpectedly starts to sound like music. By studying these sudden shifts in perception, we aim to understand how insight shapes our enjoyment of sound and music, and how the brain transforms ambiguous information into meaningful and aesthetically rewarding experiences.
We are pleased to announce that Patrick Lederer, postdoc in the Computational Social Choice Group at the ILLC, received an Exemplary Paper Award at the 27th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'26), which took place in Rome this July.
The paper receiving the award studies the problem of guaranteeing proportional representation in rank aggregation using the methods of social choice theory. This problem arises, for instance, when you want to aggregate several rankings of hotels based on, say, price, location, and cleanliness into a single overall ranking that adequately accounts for the importance you ascribe to each of these criteria. Thus, for instance, if you are looking for an overall ranking that is to 50% based on price, to 30% on location, and to 20% on cleanliness, then the overall ranking should agree with the price ranking on at least 50% of all pairs of hotels (and accordingly for location and cleanliness). In his paper, Patrick showed that existing methods of aggregation do not satisfy this seemingly simple requirement and designed new methods that do. The paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16177.
The call for pre-proposals for the NWO-Veni 2026 is now open. "Veni" is part of the NWO Talent Programme and targeted at researchers who are transitioning towards independence and whose academic qualities clearly exceed what is customary at this career stage. Researchers who have obtained their PhD between 1 January 2023 and 2 September 2026 are eligible to apply. Extensions are possible. The Veni offers € 320.000 for projects with a duration of up to three years. The deadline for pre-proposals is on 2 September 2025. Full proposals must be submitted by 27 January 2027.
The KHMW Young Talent Awards 2026 recognize outstanding students in science and technology at Dutch universities. The program includes 18 Graduation Awards (€1,000–€3,000 each) for exceptional master’s theses or research reports and 68 Incentive Awards of €500 each reward top first-year students (2024/2025) in fields like Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, and Mathematics.
The KHMW Responsible Internet Thesis Awards recognize outstanding master’s theses addressing the future of a safer, more accessible, and better-governed internet. Two prizes are awarded annually: a first prize of €3,000 and a second prize of €1,000. Nominations for the 2026 edition are open for students graduating in the 2025/2026 academic year at a Dutch university.
The Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) invites nominations for the 2026 Jan Brouwer Thesis Prizes, offering ten awards of €3,000 each to master’s students in the humanities and social sciences who graduated in the 2025/2026 academic year at a Dutch university.
Entrelacs SAS, a startup based in France building AI-powered psychological assessment tools using large language models, is offering a fully remote summer research internship. The internship runs for approximately 8 weeks, is 100% remote (no need to be based in France), and is offered under a French convention de stage — students enrolled outside France are welcome, provided their institution can issue an equivalent internship agreement. They will be working closely with our supervisor Dr Miguel Silan.
For more information, please reach out to Nica via email.
KU Leuven’s Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence (DTAI) section is seeking outstanding researchers to advance the field of combinatorial optimization within Bart Bogaerts’ research group. Two fully-funded positions are available: a PhD role focused on developing human-understandable explanations for optimization decisions, and a postdoc role aimed at ensuring end-to-end correctness guarantees for combinatorial solvers. Both projects leverage breakthroughs like proof logging and machine-verifiable certificates to enhance reliability, auditability, and trust in AI-driven decisions—critical for high-stakes applications and compliance with regulations like GDPR. Candidates will contribute to innovative research, such as debugging via proofs, rigorous algorithm evaluation, and domain-specific explanation methods.
Applications for the PhD role close September 30, 2026, and for the postdoc role, October 30, 2026.