News and Events: Projects and Awards
These pages provide information about recent developments at or relevant to the ILLC. Please let us know if you have material that you would like to be added to the news pages, by using the online submission form. For minor updates to existing entries you can also email the news administrators directly. English submissions strongly preferred.
Headlines Projects and Awards
Projects and Awards
-
Yde Venema is awarded an NWO TOP Grant
We are pleased to announce that Yde Venema has been awarded an NWO TOP Grant for his project proposal `Derivation Systems for Modal Fixpoint Logic'. Fixpoints are powerful mechanisms to express important properties in a wide range of logics, and the goal of the research is to develop, study and apply sound and complete proof systems for such logics. The project will fund two PhD students and one postdoc. -
ERC Consolidator Grant awarded to Raquel Fernández
We are pleased to announce that Raquel Fernández has been awarded an ERC Consolidator, to work on Distributed dynamic representations for dialogue management (DREAM).
Our ability to communicate using language in conversation is considered the hallmark of human intelligence. Yet, while holding a dialogue is effortless for most of us, modelling this basic human skill by computational means has proven extremely difficult. Fernández will address this challenge by establishing a new computational model of a dialogue agent that can learn to take part in conversation directly from data about language use. Her model is grounded in linguistic theories of dialogue, but exploits recent advances in computational learning that allow the agent to learn the representations that it manipulates directly from experience. This constitutes a paradigm shift in dialogue modelling --- from predefined symbolic representations to automatic representation learning – that will break new scientific ground in (computational) linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Fernández will implement the agent as an artificial neural network system and train it with task-oriented conversations where the participants have a well-defined end goal. The agent will be able to integrate linguistic and perceptual information, leading to more human-like and effective communication.
For more information, see https://erc.europa.eu/node/1344 or contact Raquel Fernández at raquel.fernandez at uva.nl. -
Florian Speelman wins Andreas Bonn medal 2018
The GNGH, the Dutch Society for the Advancement of Science, Medicine and Surgery, awarded the Andreas Bonn medals 2018 to Florian Speelman (CWI and QuSoft), Remco Molenaar (AMC) and Edwin van der Pol (AMC) on 16 November 2018. The Andreas Bonn medals are presented once every five years for original work in the scientific fields of Natural Sciences, Physical Sciences and Medicine & Dentistry, for PhD defences that took place at the UvA or VU University Amsterdam. Besides the medal, the winners received 1000 euro. A total of 18 young researchers were nominated for the prize.For more information, see http://gngh.uva.nl/content/nieuws/2018/11/uitreiking-andreas-bonn-medailles-2018.html.