Research Team

These are the great colleagues that are currently (or have been) part of my research team. Together, we strive to create the next generation of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence system, and, through them, create societal and economic impact.

Below, the list of Assistant Professors, Ph.D. students, post-doctoral researchers, and research engineers that have been part of my research team over the years.

Assistant Professors

Achilleas Psyllidis is Assistant Professor of Location Intelligence in the KInD group at the Delft University of Technology. Achilleas obtained in 2016 a Ph.D. in Urban Informatics from the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment with a thesis titled Revisiting Urban Dynamics through Social Urban Data. Achilleas joined the team in 2014, working on the SocialGlass project.

Himanshu Verma is Assistant Professor in the Knowledge and Intelligence Design group at the Delft University of Technology. Himanshu holds a PhD in Computer Science from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). His research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, and Social Cognition. Himanshu joined the KInD group in 2020.

Evangelos Niforatos is Assistant Professor of Human-AI Interaction in the Knowledge and Intelligence Design group at the Delft University of Technology. Evangelos holds a PhD in Computer Science from Universitá della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland. Evangelos joined the Knowledge and Intelligence Design group in 2021.

Ph.D. Students

Garoa Gomez Beldarrain started her PhD in September 2022, working with Himanshu Verma, Euiyoung Kim and I on the topic “Investigating the adoption of AI-enhanced processes”, a collaboration with the Schiphol group.

Mireia Yurrita Semperena started her PhD in July 2021, working with Dave Murray-Rust and I on the DCODE project, Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN).

Samuel Kernan Freire started his PhD in November 2020, working with Evangelos Niforatos and I on the COALA H2020 project. Samuel’s research focuses on how manufacturing workers can be cognitively supported using AI-based tools.

Evert van Beek started his PhD in July 2020, working with Stella Boess on the IEBB-project (Integrale Energietransitie Bestaande Bouw). His doctoral research focuses on service- and product innovation for heat pumps in residential buildings.

Roos Teeuwen started her PhD in April 2020, working with Achilleas Psyllidis and I on the “Equal-Life” project. She studies urban greenspaces in a pedestrian-centered manner: how they relate to their physical surroundings and how people perceive such spaces.

Vasileios Milias started his PhD in March 2020, working with Achilleas Psyllidis and I on the “Equal-Life” project. His work focuses human-centred approaches for the analysis of activity patterns in the context of mental health.

Ziyu Li started her PhD in November 2019, working with Asterios Katsifodimos and I on the Cognizant “HyperEdgeSensing” project. Her work focuses on complex event processing in real-time video streams.

Tim Draws started his PhD in August 2019, working with Nava Tintarev on a project sponsored by IBM Netherlands. His work focuses on the representation of diverse viewpoints in search results. I had the opportunity to work with Tim during the first months of his PhD, and to collaborate on some publications.

Agathe Balayn started her PhD in April 2019, working with Christoph Lofi and I on the Cognizant HyperEdgeSensing project. Her work focuses on Crowd Computing systems for automated data labeling in distributed machine learning infrastructures.

Ioannis Petros Samiotis (Petros) started his PhD in June 2018, working with Christoph Lofi and I on the EU H2020 “Trompa” project. Petros is studying how Crowd Computing techniques can facilitate the opening of classical music archives.

Shahin Sharifi Noorian joined the team in August 2017. Shahin is studying novel inference methods for time-varying and subjective properties of real-world locations from social data.

Sihang Qiu joined the team in October 2017, with a CSC (China Scholarship Council) scholarship. Sihang graduated in October 2021 with a thesis titled Conversational Crowdsourcing.

Vincent Gong joined the team in April 2016, working with Prof. Serge Hoogendoorn, Dr. Winnie Daamen and I on the ERC Allegro project. Vincent graduated in September 2020 with a thesis titled Using Social Media to Characterise Crowds in City Events for Crowd Management. Vincent is currently a Post-doctoral researcher.

Sepideh Mesbah joined the team in March 2016, working with Christoph Lofi and I on the SmartPub project. Sepideh graduated in May 2020 with a thesis titled Semantic-Enhanced Training Data Augmentation Methods for Long-Tail Entity Recognition Models. Sepideh is currently working as senior data scientist at Randstad.

Jie Yang joined the team in September 2013, and graduated in November 2017 with a thesis titled Crowd Knowledge Acceleration. Jie is currently working as Assistant Professor in the Web Information Systems group at the Delft University of Technology.

Jasper Oosterman joined the team in 2012. The topic of Jasper’s dissertation is Crowd Knowledge Generation for artwork annotations, which is planned for completion in 2021. Jasper is currently working as Data Scientist at Blendle.

Post-doctoral Researchers

Sergei Zhilin joined the team in May 2022, working with Achilleas Psyllidis and I on the “Designing Rhythms for Social Resilience” project.

Yen-Chia Hsu joined the team in 2021, working in the context of the PERISCOPE (Pan-European Response to the Impacts of COVID-19 and future Pandemics and Epidemics) project. Yen-Chia is currently working as Assistant Professor at the Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam.

Andrea Mauri joined the team in April 2018, working in the context of the NWA JOIN “Big Data for Evidence-based Youth Policy” project. He later worked as Research Fellow with the AMS Institute. Andrea is currently working as a Junior Professor (Chaire de Professor Junior) at Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, affiliated with the Liris Research Lab.

Panagiotis Mavridis has been part of the team between 2018 and 2020, working in the context of the NWA VWDATA Capture Bias project.

Kishor Chandra Joshi has been part of the team in 2018. Kishor worked in the context of the EIT Digital Welcome project. The project aimed at providing city-scale crowd monitoring solutions for public administrations and retailers. Kishor is currently a Marie Curie Postdoc Fellow (MSCA-IF) at CNRS, University of Paris-Saclay.

Pavel Kucherbaev has been part of the team in 2017. Pavel worked in the context of the EIT Digital CrowdInsights project. Pavel investigated the use of human-aided conversational agents (chatbots with humans-in-the-loop) to facilitate the interaction between urban stakeholders. Pavel is currently a Data Scientist at Booking.com.

Stefano Bocconi has been part of the team between 2014 and 2015. Stefano was a driving force in the design and creation of the SocialGlass project. Stefano is currently a Software Developer at Waag Society.

Research Engineers and Junior Researchers

**Ji-Youn Jung ** joined the team in 2022, after successfully graduatiing wiht our research group. Ji-Youn is spending this bridging period between her graduation and a PhD designing and conducting research on interaction with conversational agents.

Carlo Van Der Valk joined the team in 2017. Carlo is a research engineer at the AMS Institute and has worked on the development of SocialGlass within the Urban Data Science team. Carlo is responsible for the design and implementation of new services and features for SocialGlass and the deployment of SocialGlass as a service.

Erik Boertjes joined the team in 2016 as an independent research engineer in the realm of data visualisation. Erik currently works as Data Visualization Engineer in the Urban Data Science team of the AMS institute.

Ioannis Protonotarios has been part of the team between 2017 and 2019. Ioannis worked as research engineer in the Social Data Lab, contributing with his expertise in Embedded Systems and IoT engineering to the activities of the Smart Cities research domain of the Delft Data Science initiative.

Manuel Valle Torre has been part of the team between 2017 and 2018. Manuel was a driving force in the design and creation of the SmartPub platform, and contributed to research and education activities.

Christiaan Titos Bolivar has been part of the team between 2014 and 2015. Christiaan contributed to the development of the SocialGlass project. Christiaan is currently a Software Developer at Chainels.

Alumni

Through the years, the team’s activities have also been supported by great colleagues like Nirav Malsattar(2021-2022) and Julia Ubeda Briones (2020-2021).

MSc and BSc Students

I have supervised more than 70 BSc and MSc graduation projects.