New ILLC professor: Jan van Eijck

photograph Jeroen Oerlemans

The ILLC is pleased to announce that Professor Jan van Eijck has been appointed professor of Computational Semantics as of 1st November 2011 on a special chair set up by the Stichting Bèta Plus at the University of Amsterdam.

Professor Van Eijck is a senior researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI, centre for mathematics and computer science) and, until recently, was part-time professor of computational linguistics at UiL-OTS (Research Institute for Language and Speech), Utrecht. His interests include formal language theory, computational linguistics (especially semantics), functional programming, epistemic logic and social software. One of his contributions to the theory of formal languages is a study of the hierarchy of higher-order quantifiers, in the spirit of Keenan. In his recent book, Computational Semantics with Functional Programming, he uses his findings to determine the scope of quantifiers. Van Eijck is a proponent of using functional programming to give a computational twist to logical analysis. One of the results is the epistemic model checker DEMO, a tool for controlling multi-agent knowledge and belief representation after calculating the effects of communicative actions.

Professor Van Eijck will be at the ILLC on Thursdays, where he is to be found in room C3.122.

For more information, see http://homepages.cwi.nl/~jve/.