The STW project Energy Efficient Computer-Brain Interaction (principal investigator for LIACS: dr. T.P. Stefanov) has been granted. Funding for LIACS: 1 PhD student + travel/equipment budget, project duration: 4 years.

Research and education at the intersection of law and technology is more important than ever. With its 40 years of experience, the eLaw department, founded in 1985, is ready for the future. Time to reflect on four decades of innovation.

The coronavirus has the world in its grip. Finding a cure has never been more important. Unfortunately, the development of new drugs for treatment of the COVID-19 disease caused by the virus and development of a vaccine are complex, lengthy, and above all costly processes. With the help of computer…

How do we know what a quantum computer is good for when it hasn't been built yet? That's what PhD candidate Casper Gyurik investigated by combining two terms you often hear: quantum computing and machine learning.

The right student in the right place. That is what LIACS programme director Frank Takes and education coordinator Joyce Glerum are aiming to do with the ‘Wisselstroom’ project. By next year, they hope to have a standardised protocol that will make it easier for computer science students to transfer…

Six master students of the Computer Science programme will present their papers on future cities at the NetMob conference in Oxford. The six papers were part of the international Future Cities Challenge and made it to the top 10 of all entries.

On September 7, the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science participated with a team of six students in the first edition of the Capture the Flag event 'Challenge the Cyber'. They were placed second in this national hacking competition for students.

Computer applications and quantitative methods in archaeology CAA95.

Affective Computing (AC and sometimes called ‘Emotional AI’) provides opportunities to automatically process emotional data. However, is EU data protection law fit for purpose when it is applied to such AC approaches?

The precolonial inhabitants of the Caribbean islands communicated, travelled, and exchanged objects and ideas along an expansive inter-island network. New methods of computer modeling shed light on these networks. Emma Slayton is set to discuss her work on this topic at her Defense on the 12th of Se…

Whether a microbe is beneficial or harmful to a plant can now be predicted with high accuracy thanks to bacLIFE. This bioinformatic tool with an intuitive interface makes it much easier to unlock the secrets of bacterial genomes. A group of Leiden biologists presented it in Nature Communications.

Simulating human language understanding on the computer is a great challenge. A way to approach it is to represent natural language meanings in logic, and to use logical provers to determine what does and does not follow from a text. What logic is best to use and how natural language meanings are best…

On a structural level, the properties featured by a majority of mechanical metamaterials can be ascribed to the finite number of soft internal degrees-of freedom allowing for low-energy deformations.

In online games conflicts between players may arise. Novin, Bos, Stevenson and Rieffe investigated factors that may explain why some adolescents react more angrily than others in this type of situation. In their realistically designed gaming environment, the (pre-programmed) fellow player suddenly started…

In a world first, an international team of researchers has read an unopened letter from Renaissance Europe – without breaking its seal or damaging it in any way. Nadine Akkerman, Reader in early modern English literature at Leiden University, is co-author of the article that appeared on 2 March in Nature…

Archaeologist Fulco Scherjon has used computer simulations to identify where and how Neanderthals lived in West Europe. What stood out was that they probably had lots of children and lived in smaller groups than was previously thought. PhD defence on 28 May.

Promotor: R. Cramer

Archaeologists often use the percentages of heat-affected stone or bone artifacts found at archaeological sites as a way to determine how frequently fire was used by the inhabitants. Andrew Sorensen and Fulco Scherjon have come up with a computer model called 'fiReproxies' to simulate how fires used…

Affective Computing (AC and sometimes called ‘Emotional AI’) provides opportunities to automatically process emotional data. However, is EU data protection law fit for purpose when it is applied to such AC approaches?

Current social norms are unsustainable, making behavior change crucial for addressing the climate crisis. Social norms can shift rapidly after tipping points, but these are often only recognised in hindsight. To promote change, we need better predictive power, i.e. ability to detect early warning signs…

By comparing individual health data with population data, doctors can provide personalized health advice and patients can learn from each other's experiences. Wessel Kraaij, professor of Applied Data Analytics shows how personal data can have predictive value.

Promotores: A.P. IJzerman, H.W.T. van Vlijmen

Computer Science on place 51 in QS World Universities Ranking 2011

Kirsten Kanneworff and David Dechant defend their PhD research on quantum physics at Leiden University. Fundamental work with applications in location verification and the financial world.

Identifying natural plant-associated bacteria that provide targeted inhibition of pathogens through the production of antimicrobial peptides.

The research presented in this thesis concerns one of the most important questions in software engineering of our time: how can we make sure that software is free from memory safety bugs?

LIACS scholars Thomas Bäck and Hao Wang will be the new Editors-in-Chief of the Evolutionary Computation Journal from November 1. Published by MIT Press since its foundation in 1993, the journal stands as a keystone in the field, providing a global platform for researchers exploring the workings of…

Designing innovative algorithms, thinking outside the box, and brainstorming over coffee with his colleagues — this is what physicist Stefano Polla enjoys most. His success shines through in his nomination for the C.J. Kok Jury Award 2024 for PhD thesis of the Year.

For the first time, a computer can compete with the very best human players in StarCraft II, a video game played by tens of thousands at a professional level and by millions just for fun. Mike Preuss, university lecturer at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) responds to the achievement…

With increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and their detrimental effect on the global climate, modern society needs to push for more renewable energy sources. Storing widely accessible and abundant solar energy in chemical bonds in the form of molecular fuel via artificial photosynthesis…

Constraint multi-objective optimization with a limited budget for function evaluations is challenging. This thesis tackles this problem by proposing new optimization algorithms. These algorithms are applied on holistic ship design problems. This helps naval architects balance objectives like cost, efficiency,…

Can a computer give just as good a judgment as a judge? Professor emeritus Law and IT believes it can and talks about using computers in the courtroom in a podcast of the Universiteit van Vlaanderen.

Drug-target binding kinetics determine the time course of the central event in pharmacotherapy: Drug-target interaction.

Brain activity changes as people age, which can lead to cognitive decline. By measuring and comparing brain data from mice and humans, the researcher will investigate how the brain’s noise levels change with age and affect choice behavior.

With the rise of AI, interest in computational linguistics and language models has taken flight. But machines are far from being able to go it alone. In her inaugural lecture, Professor Carole Tiberius will stress the importance of research on word combinations. ‘We know a great deal but there is a…

In healthcare, gender and sex considerations are crucial because they affect individuals' health and disease differences. Yet, most algorithms deployed in the healthcare context lack close consideration of these aspects and do not account for bias detection. In their latest paper, Eduard Fosch-Villaronga,…

Promotor: S.J. Edixhoven, Co-promotor: K.J. Batenburg

Samineh Bagheri is the first PhD candidate to defend her thesis fully remotely.

On 13 March 2024, Carlotta Rigotti, postdoc researcher at eLaw, and Alexandre Puttick, postdoc researcher at Bern University of Applied Sciences, remotely presented the working paper 'Towards mitigating diversity bias of AI in recruitment and selection via value sensitive design' at the ACM Symposium…

Leiden Law Cast is a podcast made by Leiden Law School, Leiden University, for everyone who wants to learn more about current legal issues.