Filip Ilievski

• Assistant Professor, Sr. (UD1), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• Co-lead, Learning and Reasoning Group
• Affiliated Scientist, USC Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI)
• Affiliated Scientist, Amsterdam Sustainability Institute (ASI)
• 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, Human-Centric NLP, AI for Social Good

Open positions

I am currently working on growing my team at VU Amsterdam. I like collaborating with strong students who are passionate about human-centric AI with common sense and state-of-the-art technologies like language models and neuro-symbolic systems.

As of August 2024, I am looking for a PhD student on the cross-disciplinary topic of Value-aware interpretation of Internet Memes, in collaboration with a communication scientist.

I am also looking to hire Postdocs to work with me on analogies, internet memes, and visual reasoning. The calls for these positions should be out during the Fall.

Note that there are usually other positions about to open, so if you are interested in working with me as a PhD student or a Postdoc, contact me via email.

News

• 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 will be published later this year.
• Welcome to the three new additions to my common sense AI team this Spring: Hossein Khojasteh, Mehdi Jafari, and Ruthu Rooparaghunath. They are joining me as research assistants on the Humane AI project of developing personalized recommendations for educational materials.
• 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.

Funded Research

• Human-Centric AI with Common Sense (PI), NWO AiNed (matched by VU Amsterdam and industry). 03/2024

• Supporting Sustainable Diet Policies by Knowledge-based AI (PI; Co-PI Heinout Reijungs, ASI Seed funding. 12/2023

• Decision-making by Analogical Reasoning over exoTic Situations (DARTS) (PI), ARL DEVCOM. 08/2023

• Coherent and commonsensical AI for social influence (PI; Co-PI: Gale Lucas), USC/ISI and ARL. 02/2023

• Knowledge Graph Technology for Information Analytics (Swiss Cybersecurity department). Grant. F. Ilievski, P. Szekely. 06/2022

• Robust and Explainable AI Agents with Common Sense (NSF CRII). Grant. F. Ilievski. 05/2022

• iPASSAGE: improved Performance, Analytics and Summarization of Synergistic Anticipation of Geopolitical Events (Co-PI; PI: Fred Morstatter), Open Philanthropy via the University of Maryland, 02/2022

• MoSAiC: Multi-modal architecture for holistic Situational Awareness in Contextual IoT (Bosch Research). Gift. F. Ilievski. 12/2021