Organization

I enjoy taking responsibility in activities that concern the broader computer science and academic community. This gives me a way to contribute to shaping not only my own research line but the community as a whole. Usually I have lots of ideas on how things could be made better or on directions in which the community could develop in the future. These activities give me a platform to realise these ideas.

Academic Leadership

• Coordinator of the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Ethics in the Dutch national NWO gravitation research programme on Hybrid Intelligence (2019-2029). Started 2023.
• Initiator (2021) and chair of the national working group Teaching Responsible AI (TRAI), which has emerged as part of the platform on Participative and Constructive Ethics (PACE) which is part of the Human-centric AI building block of the NL AIC. The goal of TRAI is to bring together stakeholders such as teachers, students, and organizations who are interested in developing materials, practices and methods of teaching and adopting Responsible AI for exchanging expertise, community building and agenda setting.
• Advisory board member of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Safe and Trusted Artificial Intelligence of King’s College London and Imperial College London. Joined 2020.
• Co-chair of the HI-ESDiT committee which is tasked with setting up collaboration between the gravitation projects Hybrid Intelligence and Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies
• Member Informatics Advisory Board of the Lorentz Center in Leiden, a center for scientific workshops in all disciplines. The board advises on acceptance of workshop proposals and the policy of the center. Joined 2019. Interim chair January-July 2023 for two submission rounds.

Previous:

• Coordinator of the Responsible Hybrid Intelligence research line (2019-2022) in the Dutch national NWO gravitation research programme on Hybrid Intelligence (2019-2029).
• Member of the Board of the Netherlands Institute for Research on ICT (4TU.NIRICT). Comprises all ICT research of the four universities of technology of the Netherlands; 2015-2021. I shaped various community funding calls such as the research community funding, and I initiated the Diversity-Equity-Inclusion call. Moreover, I initiated a discussion at the community day of 2017 about multidisciplinary collaboration, and lead the follow up activity of writing a report about the position of ICT science.
• Member steering committee of the International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS), 2012-2021. Resulted from a merger of three workshops: DALT, ProMAS and AOSE. I have organised the DALT workshop from 2007-2009, and joined its steering committee in 2009.
• Elected member of the Board of directors of the International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS); 2012-2018. I was a member and later chair of the IFAAMAS Education & Training subcommittee.

Reviewing & Assessment

• member of the editorial board of JAAMAS, the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.
• reviewer and panel member for several funding programmes of the Dutch Research Council NWO, and the Swedish Wallenberg Foundation.
• served often on the Senior Programme Committee of some of the most important conferences in AI, in particular the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS) and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
• Programme Committee member for over 60 international conferences and workshops, including the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference, European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA), Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC), International Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Multi-Agent Systems (COIN), Computational Accountability and Responsibility in Multiagent Systems (CARe-MAS), Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems (CLIMA), and IEEE International Conferences on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO).

Organization of Workshops & Conferences

I have organised over ten international workshops and conferences, a selection of which I describe below.

Final Vidi project workshop ‘Being human in the digital society: on technology, norms and us’, 2022

On November 21st 2022 Dr. Birna van Riemsdijk (UT) and Dr. Myrthe Tielman (TUD) organized the symposium ‘Being human in the digital society: on technology, norms and us’. The symposium was set up in hybrid form, with around 25 participants attending throughout the event, either in person at TU Delft or online. It was organized in conjunction with the PhD defence of Dr. Ilir Kola, to celebrate the conclusion of the CoreSAEP NWO Vidi project (Computational Reasoning for Socially Adaptive Electronic Partners) which was awarded to Van Riemsdijk in 2014. CoreSAEP investigates software that takes into account personal norms and values. 

The project proposal was written in a time where the idea of aligning the behavior of digital technologies with personal norms and values raised some eyebrows. Since then, advances in sensor technology and AI have enabled creation of digital technologies that are more and more interwoven with almost every aspect of our daily lives, collecting data about us and influencing our behavior. This raises questions about how we want to shape this hybrid digital society: how to maintain agency in how we shape our lives with digital technologies, how to account for diversity of people and social contexts, and how to ensure our digital technologies leave space for what they cannot understand? In the symposium (see report Vidi symposium) we have taken people along on the journey we have taken over the past years in addressing these questions.

Scientific co-director HI/SIKS PhD course on Responsible AI 2022

In June 2022, the first edition of the Hybrid Intelligence/SIKS course on Responsible AI took place. I served as scientific director together with prof. Rineke Verbrugge (UG).

The course was motivated from the recognition of the increasing pervasiveness and impact of AI on our society. Consequently, it is more important than ever that AI researchers understand this context and can translate this understanding into development of AI technologies and methods that meet the needs and opportunities of people and societies. In this course,  we addressed several dimensions of Responsible and Trustworthy AI, such as AI governance; bias, non-discrimination & fairness; privacy & data ethics; and human-AI interaction. The topics are chosen in connection with the seven requirements of Trustworthy AI listed on page 14 of the European Commission report on Trustworthy AI.

We took an integrated approach of treating technical, ethical, legal and societal aspects, as well as practical considerations of Responsible AI. The course included exercises to allow participants to reflect on responsibility aspects of their own and others’ research.

Chair AI-track at ICT.Open 2019

Together with a track committee consisting of Veronika Cheplygina (TU Eindhoven), Michel Klein (VU), Maartje de Graaf (UU), Maurice Peemen (Thermo Fisher Scientific), and Maaike Harbers (Hogeschool Rotterdam), I put together a programme for the AI track at ICT.Open 2019, the yearly conference of Dutch ICT researchers. There was a lot of interest for the track, which meant we could put together an almost two-day programme!

Besides providing a platform to showcase the wide range of research conducted in the Dutch AI community, we aimed to pay special attention to aspects concerning human-centered and responsible AI. This resulted in two sessions and an interactive panel on these topics.

Co-organizer Intimate Technology workshop, 2018

As part of a three-day conference on philosophy of human-technology relations, I organized together with Merijn Bruijnes, Dirk Heylen, Gijs Huisman, and Nicola Liberati a workshop on the topic of Intimate Technology on July 11th 2018 at the DesignLab at University of Twente.

In this workshop we brought together researchers and practitioners from a range of areas including philosophy, art, and computer science to discuss and exchange ideas on how to shape intimate technologies that can contribute to human flourishing. Specifically, the workshop focused on the effects on our vulnerability through the use of intimate digital technologies following three main relations between users and technologies: Intimacy with yourself through technology, intimacy with other human beings through technology, and intimacy towards technologies.

The presentations and discussions with the audience provided for a very inspiring and interesting exploration of the combination of intimacy and technology. It showed that a multidisciplinary perspective can give rise to truly original directions for shaping this field! For more information on the workshop, see the 4TU.Humans & Technology website.

General Co-Chair Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence, BNAIC 2013

In 2013 I was general co-chair of the 25th Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC), which we hosted at TU Delft. On the occasion of this 25th edition, we organised a special open celebration session in which we invited (and challenged 🙂 ) 10 AI professors from the Benelux to give a PechaKucha talk: 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each. This made for a very lively and exciting session, which was attended by over 400 people!

Some other events

Below are some further examples of events I co-organised:

• co-chair of the 2nd International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS), 2014. Held in conjunction with AAMAS.
• co-chair of the International Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems (COIN), 2013. In conjunction with PRIMA.
• program co-chair 14th European Agent Systems Summer School (EASSS), 2012.
• co-chair of the International Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems (COIN), 2011. Held in conjunction with WI-IAT.