Short bio & research interests

Currently I am an assistant professor at the Internet Technology and Data Science Lab (IDLab), Ghent University - imec, Belgium. I'm co-leading the Text-to-Knowledge research cluster with prof. Chris Develder , where we work on natural language processing (NLP) in general, for applications in several domains (the media, biomedical applications, and economics and law). Our areas of focus in NLP are information extraction, conversational agents, and representation learning in general.

Given our expertise in neural sequence modeling, we recently started looking into the use of protein language models for drug design. Give it another year before we have something decent to show here ;). My other interests include energy-based models, combining knowledge and neural networks, and synthetic data generation. I'll add some more details and recent papers on these topics soon.

Here's where I come from. In 2005, I received my M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering at Ghent University, after finishing my final year and master thesis at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. In 2009, funded by a grant from the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), I obtained my Ph.D. at the Ghent University Department of Information Technology, under the supervision of prof. Daniel De Zutter, in the area of computational electromagnetics. Shortly afterwards, I got involved in research on Information Retrieval, in collaboration with the Database Group at the University of Twente in The Netherlands. As a post-doc, I was heavily involved in getting project funding and managing projects mainly in the media sector. Gradually, my interests moved to Natural Language Processing, machine learning, and AI in general. It was my research stay in 2016 at University College London, in prof. Sebastian Riedel's Machine Reading lab, that made me decide to continue my career as an academic researcher. In October 2019, I was appointed assistant professor at IDLab, Ghent University, co-affiliated with imec. Although the job description didn't change a lot (apart from some additional teaching - which I love), it turns out the freedom in research directions gives lots of satisfaction. That, and the great students that I've been lucky enough to attract over the last couple of years.

Latest News

November 2023 Check out my recent write-up on large language models (beware: it's short, non-technical, and in Dutch!!), useful to provide some insights to the curious non-technical reader. I wrote it for the January 2024 edition of AIG Nieuws.