Frank van Harmelen & Maarten de Rijke Appointed KNAW Members

Two senior researchers from Amsterdam Data Science have been appointed as new members of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW).

It is the first time ever that two computer scientists have been elected to the KNAW in a single year and Amsterdam Data Science is proud to feature so prominently in this years’ KNAW appointments (26 new members were appointed from all branches of science).

Frank van Harmelen is a Professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a prominent researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence. His research aims to enable computers to think and reason. For this, information must be available logically. Van Harmelen is one of the founders of Semantic Web, which aims to make data on the web semantically interpretable by machines through formal representations. The rules for which are now a worldwide standard. Additionally, he has made his group’s directive on Breast Cancer comprehensible by computers.

Maarten de Rijke is Professor of Information Retrieval at the University of Amsterdam. Maarten is best known for his contributions to research on the science behind search engines. With his team, he works on search engines that learn, independently of their users’ behavior, to improve results. He was one of the first to develop social media search engines, and those that use the knowledge in Wikipedia to learn relationships and analyze. More recently, he is developing search engines that declare their own results. His PhD candidates and postdocs contribute all over the world to better search engine technology.

Further information (in Dutch) on the KNAW website

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