Filip Ilievski
- 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, Neuro-Symbolic AI, Analogy, AI for Social Good
Open positions
We have two Postdoc positions open until January 15th:
Commonsense reasoning with multimodal foundation models - supervised together with Cees Snoek (Video & Image Sense Lab, University of Amsterdam), funded by my NWO AiNed project on human-centric AI with common sense.
Knowledge-informed reasoning about the harmfulness of internet memes - supervised together with Frank van Harmelen, in collaboration with Huawei Lab.
News
- I will give a talk in the Neurosymbolic AI (NAI) seminar series on Tuesday, 28th of January at 15h CET / 9am ET / 6am PT. Topic: Abstraction and Reasoning Beyond Foundation Models.
- 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.