JOURNALATOUR (blog)

2023

Moon milk

12 minute read

Published:

The first conferences I ever attended as a doctorate student were IJCAI 2017 and CP 2017, which both took place in Melbourne. At the time, I had a position as a visiting researcher at ICTEAM at Université catholique de Louvain. After the conference, three fellow doctorate students from UC Louvain and I travelled to Tasmania, for a two-and-a-half-day trip. It resulted in one of my favourite travel stories of all time.

Introducing gismo: a tool for finding grouped independent supports

28 minute read

Published:

My first paper since joining Prof. Dr. Kuldeep Meel’s group at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has been accepted to IJCAI 2023! The topic of this paper was a completely new direction for me, and I learned a lot during this project. I had the great privilege to work with Kuldeep and with Prof. Dr. Arunabha Sen for Arizona State University (ASU) on this project, and learned a lot from each of them. In this blog post, I will share a bit about the problem that we solve, why it needs solving, and how we solve it, introducing our new tool: gismo.

2022

Books that helped me through my doctorate

6 minute read

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Two months ago, I defended my dissertation. I am very grateful to my advisors, my doctorate committee, my opposition committee, and my paranimphs. I thought long and hard about which thank-you presents would be appropriate and of value to them. In the end, I just decided to present them with some wisdom.

It takes a village

8 minute read

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As a Master student, I once asked Siegfried if I should use ‘‘I’’ or ‘‘we’’ in my thesis. After all, the words were written by me, but we did the research together. He explained that, even if you are the sole author of a text, you should always write ‘‘we’’, because no piece of research ever is the product of just one person. I believed him then, but the experience of being a PhD candidate drove the lesson home, never to be forgotten. In this blog post, however, I am truly ‘‘I’’, and use it to thank those that make us ‘‘we’’.

2021

Defence time for Jeroen

less than 1 minute read

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I am very proud of my student Jeroen Rook, who defended his Master thesis today! The title of his presentation was: Caching in Model Counters: A Journey through Space and Time. With a very general audience, Jeroen had his work cut out for him to explain not only his work, but also the basics of propositional model counting.

I’m a good reviewer!

7 minute read

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Actually, that is not true. I am an outstanding reviewer! Or so say the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the AAAI-21 Program Committee.

2020

Daniël’s graduation

1 minute read

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I feel like I just levelled-up as a scientist! Yesterday, the wonderful Daniël Fokkinga graduated with a very nice grade!

2019

Daniël defends his work

1 minute read

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Yesterday was a very special day: Daniël Fokkinga, the master student who I have been supervising together with Marie Anastacio, Holger Hoos and Siegfried Nijssen, presented and defended his master thesis!

BNAIC/Benelearn 2019

1 minute read

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Last week I attended the Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (BNAIC) for the first time. This year, it was held in Brussels, in my beloved Belgium.

2018

Informatics Ladies’ Day 2018

less than 1 minute read

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Op vrijdag 16 november 2018 organiseren VHTO (Landelijk expertisebureau meisjes/vrouwen en bèta/techniek) en LIAXX (het vrouwennetwerk van de opleiding Informatica aan Universiteit Leiden) weer een Informatics Ladies’ Day (ILD)!