- Assistant Professor of Commonsense AI, Sr. (UD1), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Faculty, Learning and Reasoning Group
- Affiliated Scientist, USC Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI)
- Affiliated Scientist, Amsterdam Sustainability Institute (ASI)
- Scientific Coordinator, Digital Sustainability Institute (DiSC)
- Coordinator, Situated AI (BSc Minor)
- Member, ELLIS - the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems
- Research Assistant Professor, USC Computer Science (2022-2023)
- Research Scientist and Research Lead, USC Information Sciences Institute (2019-2023)
- PhD, Vrije University Amsterdam (2015-2019)
- Research Visitor, Carnegie Mellon University (2017)
- MSc, Vrije University Amsterdam (2013-2015)
- BSc, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University Skopje (2009-2013)
- Areas: Commonsense Reasoning, Neurosymbolic AI, Analogy, Human-Centric AI
News
- For VU/UvA AI students: I am now accepting thesis supervision students for Spring 2026. The list of topics will soon be published on our group’s Canvas page.
- I am teaching two courses this Fall: Conversational AI (BSc) and The Social Web (MSc).
- Our Nature Machine Intelligence article, a product of a productive Dagstuhl seminar in May 2024, is now published. The publicly accessible version can be found here.
- On September 15, two new PhDs join my lab: 1) Shaurya Gaur, who will explore software architectures for human-centric AI in collaboration with Justus Bogner (software architectures); and 2) TC Chen, who will research multimodal alignment with common sense, in collaboration with Shujian Yu (machine learning).
- During June and July, two MSc students from the University of Montpellier (group led by Madelina Croitoru), with a background in robotics, visited our lab: Mehdi Soltani and Luca Vogelsang.
- During the summer of 2025, I am attending ICWSM (Copenhagen, to present a paper), ACL (Vienna, to host the Analogy-Angle II workshop), and a Dagstuhl seminar on Neurosymbolic AI (Germany).
- In June-July, we 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 visited 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”.
- Two Master’s theses I supervised in Spring 2024 were accepted at A* and A conferences: COLUMBUS, Koen Kraaijveld’s thesis, was accepted at AAAI 2025, while Tygo Bloem’s work on multi-dimensional clustering of internet memes was published at ICWSM 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.”
