FILIP ILIEVSKI

FILIP ILIEVSKI

Assistant Professor (Sr.) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Filip Ilievski

Open positions

We have two PhD positions open until May:

  1. Multimodal Alignment with Common Sense - supervised together with Shujian Yu (deadline 19-05)
  2. Software Architecture for Human-Centric AI Systems - supervised together with Justus Bogner (deadline 05-05)

News

  • In June-July, my team will welcome two new Postdocs: 1) Emile van Krieken, who will explore commonsense reasoning with multimodal foundation models, and 2) Stefano De Giorgis, who will research knowledge-informed reasoning about the harmfulness of internet memes.
  • On Feb 3 and 4, I am visiting Konstantin Todorov and colleagues at the LIRMM (the Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics, and Microelectronics) institute. I will give a talk about what it takes to understand internet memes.
  • I gave a talk in the Neurosymbolic AI (NAI) seminar series at the end of January about Abstraction and Reasoning Beyond Foundation Models. The seminar recording will soon appear on NAI’s YouTube channel.
  • My book Human-Centric AI with Common Sense is now published in the Springer Nature Synthesis series.
  • The second iteration of our workshop Analogy-Angle (Analogy-Angle II) will be co-located with ACl 2025 in Vienna.
  • Welcome to Gabriella Bollici, who joined our group as a PhD student on December 1st. Gabriella will be supervised by me and Wouter van Atteveldt (professor of political science) and will explore narratives in internet memes.
  • I joined the ELLIS society. ELLIS stands for “European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems”.
  • For VU/UvA AI students: I am now accepting thesis supervision students for Spring 2025. For the list of topics, see our group’s Canvas page.
  • We submitted two Master theses I supervised in Spring 2024 to A* conferences. One, based on Koen Kraaijveld’s thesis, was already accepted at AAAI 2025!
  • I was interviewed for the BBC article When robots can’t riddle: What puzzles reveal about the depths of our own minds . The research I described was conducted with Koen Kraaijveld, Yifan Jiang, and Kaixin Ma. The article is part of the series “AI v. the Mind,” which explores “the limits of cutting-edge AI and learns a little about how our own brains work along the way.”
  • I am teaching two courses this Fall: Conversational AI (BSc) and The Social Web (MSc).
  • Welcome to Hossein Khojasteh, who started as a PhD focusing on analogy and abstraction on September 1, 2024.
  • Welcome to Kaan Aslan, who joined my team on September 1 to work as an RA on our new project on knowledge-driven AI for sustainable policies until February 2025.
  • I am chairing The First Workshop on Analogical Abstraction in Cognition, Perception, and Language (Analogy-ANGLE) at IJCAI 2024 in August.
  • On May 2nd and 3rd, I hosted Wael AbdAlmageed at VU Amsterdam. Wael gave a talk entitled Truth Decay - Plausible Deniability: The Liar’s Dividend and met with members of the AI groups at the VU and UvA.
  • In late April, I visited the Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST) and several universities in Tokyo and Sendai. During this trip, I talked about commonsense AI for good at JST and AIRC, and we explored future collaborations.

  • In April 2024, I submitted the book ``Human-centric AI with Common Sense’’ to the Springer Nature Synthesis series. This is an invited publication and should be published in December 2024.

  • I am co-chairing the Generative NeuroSymbolic AI (GeNeSy) workshop at ESWC 2024.
  • I am organizing a Dagstuhl seminar on Generalization by Humans and Machines from 5th to 8th of May 2024. We have 30 participants from various disciplines, including machine learning, neuro-symbolic AI, computer vision, natural language processing, and cognitive psychology.
  • Best student paper award for Prateek at K-CAP for our work Knowledge-enhanced Agents for Interactive Text Games.