News item

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  NWO Veni for Jonathan Osinski

  We are pleased to announce that Jonathan Osinski has been awarded an NWO Veni grant to work on the project entitled Applications of formal logic in international relations: modelling epistemic dynamics of conflict. Jonathan will start his project in the beginning of 2027.

  For more information, see https://www.nwo.nl/en/researchprogrammes/nwo-talent-programme/projects-veni/veni-2025 or contact illc at uva.nl.
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  NWO Veni for Ana Lucic

  We are pleased to announce that Ana Lucic has been awarded an NWO Veni Grant, to work on a project entitled Mechanistic Interpretability for Graph Machine Learning.

  For more information, see https://www.nwo.nl/en/researchprogrammes/nwo-talent-programme/projects-veni/veni-2025 or contact illc at uva.nl.
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  Jaap Jumelet wins the EurAI Dissertation Award

  We are pleased to announce that Jaap Jumelet received the EurAI Dissertation Award for Best European AI Dissertation for his thesis "Finding Structure in Language Models". Congratulations!

  For more information, see https://www.eurai.org/award/Jaap-Jumelet or contact illc at uva.nl.
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  Patrick Lederer wins Distinguished Paper Award at International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2026

  We are pleased to report that Patrick Lederer, postdoc in the Computational Social Choice Group at the ILLC, and his coauthors received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), held in Bremen, Germany, this August. It was one of three distinguished papers, selected from over 5,000 submissions to the conference. Congratulations!

  Patrick's work concerns the problem of designing a good budget allocation rule that can be used to decide how much of a common budget to assign to each of several projects, based on the preferences reported by a number of individuals. While it is known to be mathematically impossible to design a rule that meets all of the criteria one might look for in such a setting—such as being fair to individuals and incentivising them to report their own preferences truthfully—the paper shows that surprisingly positive results are within reach if we are willing to slightly relax the requirement of incentivising truthfulness. Specifically, it turns out that there in fact are good rules that do not disincentivise misreporting of preferences entirely but that instead bound the benefits anyone might reap from misreporting.

  A preprint of Patrick's paper, entitled "Approximate Strategyproofness in Approval-Based Budget Division", is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11736.

  For more information, see https://2026.ijcai.org.
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  Celebrating Jouko Väänänen’s Honorary Doctorate from the National University of Colombia

  We are very happy to share some wonderful news: Jouko Väänänen has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the National University of Colombia (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), recognizing both his remarkable contributions to mathematical logic and his long-standing commitment to the mathematical community in Colombia.

  Click on the link to read the full laudatio (in pdf).

  For more information, see http://settheory.eu/documents/Vaananenhonorarydoctorate.pdf.
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  (New) Sandro Pezelle awarded the NWO Vidi grant

  ILLC's Sandro Pezelle has been awarded the Vidi grant for his project "Do AI Systems Evaluate and Comment on Events as People Do?". Congratulations!

  For more information, see https://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/news/2026/10/vidi-grant-for-nine-talented-uva-researchers.html?utm_campaign=20261022%20Medewerkersnieuwsbrief%20EN&utm_source=deployteq&utm_medium=e-mail.