Mitra Baratchi

Mitra is an assistant professor at LIACS. She is also affiliated with LCDS, and Leiden-Delft-Erasmus (LDE) center for BOLD Cities. Her research interest lies in spatio-temporal, time-series, spatio-temporal, and mobility data modeling. More specifically, she aims at designing algorithms that extract patterns from such data in a fully automated manner. Such research is targeting applications in a broad range of urban, environmental, and industrial domains for which she has collaborations notably with the European Space Agency, Honda Research Institute, various municipalities, and researchers in other scientific disciplines.

Before joining LIACS, Mitra was a postdoctoral researcher in the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems Research (DACS) Group at the University of Twente. Prior to that, she was a researcher in the Ambient Intelligence Research Group at Saxion University of Applied Sciences. In June 2015, she received her PhD. degree in Computer Science from University of Twente.

Matthijs van Leeuwen

Matthijs is associate professor and group leader of the Explanatory Data Analysis group at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University. He likes data, patterns, algorithms, and information theory. He strives for data mining and machine learning methods and results that are principled, interpretable, and incorporate domain knowledge.

Matthijs was previously a senior researcher (2015-2016) and tenure track assistant professor (2016-2020) at LIACS. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Universiteit Utrecht for almost two years (2009-2011) and in the Machine Learning group of KU Leuven for four years (2011-2015). He defended his Ph.D. thesis titled Patterns that Matter in February 2010, which he wrote under supervision of prof.dr. Arno Siebes in the Algorithmic Data Analysis group of Universiteit Utrecht.

Iris Yocarini

Iris is a postdoc at LIACS involved in the D-ActWheels project with Prof.dr. Kraaij. Within this project, accelerometer data from wearables and indirect calorimetry data is used for human activity recognition and energy expenditure estimation models aimed at promoting a healthy lifestyle for wheelchair users. Her research interests involve the integration of multimodal data, the use and analyses of wearable data, psychometrics and applied statistics.

Iris has obtained her master’s degree in Brain and Cognition Psychology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and in Methodology and Statistics in Psychology at Leiden University. In September 2019, she obtained her PhD in psychometrics from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, titled ‘Testing in higher education: decisions on student’s performance’.

Daniela Gawehns

Daniela is a PhD researcher at LIACS working on methods to integrate multimodal data and extract information from such data. Her research is part of the project Dementia Back in the Heart of the Community where the use of a public park by patients with dementia, their families and people from the neighbourhood is assessed. Her work is supervised by Dr Matthijs van Leeuwen, her promotor is Prof.dr. Aske Plaat.

Stylianos Paraschiakos

Stelios is a PhD candidate at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) with a background in Computer Science and Mathematics. His research interest is on machine learning tools and methodologies for human activity recognition and energy expenditure estimation using wearable sensor data (time series data). His work focuses on healthy ageing and how physical activity of older individuals is linked to parameters of metabolic health. He is supervised by Dr M.Beekman (LUMC) and Dr A.Knobbe (LIACS), his promotor is Prof. E.Slagboom (LUMC).

Nuno César de Sá

Nuno is a PhD researcher within LCDS at the Institute of Environmental Science (CML) of Leiden University on the topic of Earth observation for Ecosystem processes. His research explores the use of big data and cloud computing opportunities in the field of Earth observation to monitor biodiversity variables with a focus on Rewilding and nature-driven solutions. He is supervised by Dr Mitra Baratchi (LIACS) and Prof.dr.ir. P.M. van Bodegom (CML).

Wouter Verschoof-van der Vaart

Wouter is a PhD researcher within LCDS at the Faculty of Archaeology. His research focuses on combining Deep Learning and Geographic Information Systems for the automated detection of archaeology in remotely sensed data. He is supervised by Dr Karsten Lambers and Dr Wojtek Kowalczyk.

Duc Nguyen

Duc Nguyen joined LIACS in October 2017 to work on the “Cross-Industry Platform for Predictive Maintenance Optimization (CIMPLO)” project. This project is a collaboration between LIACS, KLM and Honda. The project aims at developing a cross-industry predictive maintenance optimization platform, which addresses the real-world requirements for dynamic, scalable multiple-criteria maintenance scheduling. Although the system's capabilities will be demonstrated on the application of aircraft engines (KLM) and passenger cars (Honda), it will be developed as a cross-industry platform for generic applications in predictive, multi-objective, dynamic maintenance scheduling. His main interest is predictive maintenance where he uses time-series data from sensors to predict upcoming failures and remaining useful lifetime of systems, sub-system, and/or components in complex engineered systems.

Marios Kefalas

Marios Kefalas joined LIACS in September 2015 as a master's student in Computer Science and since April 2018 has a PhD. position in the Natural Computing group under the supervision of Prof.dr. Thomas Baeck and Dr. Mitra Baratchi in the CIMPLO project. He has a background in pure and applied Mathematics and Bioinformatics. His interests are in time series analysis, predictive modelling, forecasting, optimization and applications.

Can Wang

Can joined the ADA research group at LIACS in January 2018 as a PhD. candidate under the supervision of prof.dr. Holger H. Hoos, prof.dr.Thomas Bäck, and Dr Mitra Baratchi. Before joining LIACS, she was a researcher under the supervision of Beng Chin Ooi at School of Computing, National University of Singapore. Can received her master degrees from Ecole Centrale Paris (France) and Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) by majoring in computer science in 2017.

Can's research interests include automated machine learning, dynamic data analytics, data mining and general machine learning. Currently, she is working at project 'Dynamic Data Analytics through automatically Constructed Machine Learning Pipelines'. This research aims at developing a platform for dynamic data analytics that is based on techniques for automatically constructing machine learning pipelines for the task at hand.

Marieke Vinkenoog

Marieke is a PhD student working on the 'Data Science for State-of-the-Art Blood Banking' (BloodStart) project. This project is a collaboration between Sanquin and Leiden University, and aims to significantly improve the prediction of donor medical test outcomes and donor behaviour. Data of the past 20 years is available, on around 12 million donations. The BloodStart project will deliver enhanced data-driven models and evidence-based donor management strategies that will maximise the effectiveness of resources and minimise donor loss. The main supervisors of the project will be Mart Janssen from Sanquin and Matthijs van Leeuwen and Aske Plaat from Leiden University.

Marieke completed the Master Statistical Science with a specialisation in Data Science in 2018 at Leiden University. Her Bachelor's degree is in Biology, and she enjoys combining knowledge from both scientific areas in her research.

Maedeh Nasri

Maedeh Nasri is a PhD candidate at the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology (Institute of Psychology) at Leiden University. Her PhD project is embedded in a larger research project called “Data‐driven, urban policymaking for social inclusion of young, vulnerable people” within the Centre for BOLD Cities, as part of the NWO-funded 'Breaking the cycle' project.

Within this larger project, Maedeh will focus on designing algorithms that extract patterns representing individual and social behaviours of pupils; and their use of space; thus exploring the complex interaction patterns over time and in space of prosocial behaviour and its links with structural and functional developmental changes.

Maedeh's PhD project is supervised by Prof.dr. Carolien Rieffe, Dr Mitra Baratchi (LIACS), Dr Sarah Giest (Leiden University) and Dr Alexander Koutamanis (Delft University of Technology).

Laurens Arp

Laurens is a PhD student at LIACS under the supervision of Mitra Baratchi, Holger Hoos and Peter van Bodegom. Prior to this, he joined SIG-STDM as a MSc student, and he obtained his Master's degree at Leiden University in 2020.

Laurens' research is funded by an NWO ENW-KLEIN grant awarded to Mitra Baratchi for her project named "Physics-aware Spatio-temporal Machine Learning for Earth Observation Data", which involves a collaboration with the European Space Agency. The goal of the project is to create hybrid models of mutually interacting environmental processes on Earth, combining theory-driven physical models and data-diven machine learning models using Earth observation data.

Frederick van der Meulen

Frederick is a Master’s student in Computer Science: Advanced Data Analytics student at LIACS. His interests lie in the field of Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence and Lossless data compression techniques. He is currently working on his master’s thesis.

Fan Yang

Fan Yang works as a PhD student at LIACS. His research interests include automated machine learning, data mining, time series data analysis and blockchain technology. The aim of his research is to use time series data mining methods for classification, regression, and the automated optimization of parameter settings in data mining algorithms. In addition, recent projects aim to use automated machine learning methods for earthquake time to failure prediction, and to propose an automated machine learning model using EEG data to achieve the task of depression level forecasting.

Tobias Oberkofler

Tobias Florin Oberkofler is a Master student of Computer Science: Data Science at Leiden University, and joined the group in March 2021. He obtained his Bachelor's dgree in Data Science and Knowledge Engineering (Data Science and Artificial Intelligence) from Maastricht University in 2020. He is currently working on his Master's thesis under the supervision of Dr. Mitra Baratchi. His research is focused on applications of informed neural architecture search (NAS) and general automated machine learning (AutoML) in the domain of spatio-temporal mobility data. The focus is in particular on the prediction of crowd flow and vehicle trajectories.

Julia Wąsala

Julia is a Master's student in the CS and Artificial Intelligence program at LIACS. Previously, she finished a BSc in Astronomy at Leiden Observatory. In October 2021, she joined the group to work on her Master's thesis on data-guided explainable super-resolution under the supervision of Mitra Baratchi, Laurens Arp and Suzanne Marselis. She is interested in the fields of Urban Computing, AI and working on problems with real-life applications that can serve to inform the decisions regarding climate and health.

Richard van Dijk

Richard is a research software engineer at LIACS, being a member of the LIACS software lab headed by Prof.dr.ir. Joost Visser. He started in February 2021.

He has more than 30 years of experience in algorithm development in signal processing, computer vision and machine learning and (embedded) high quality software engineering for technical applications/devices.

At LIACS he is involved in the SchoolYard- and Dementia project (smart watch applications and data pre-processing), the SAILS data observatory, MycoDiversity and Naturalis BioDiversity Center and the Linking University City and Diversity project.

Gilles Ottervanger

Nelly Rosaura Palacios Salinas

Jaco Tetteroo

Zhou Zhou