Unit Amsterdam

• Serving as a central conduit between Amsterdam’s AI/ML ecosystem and prominent artificial intelligence networks across Europe.
• Facilitating investment in AI-focused initiatives within Amsterdam while promoting collaboration among local stakeholders to highlight the city’s technological competitiveness.
• Collaborating with leading industry partners to attract, develop, and retain top-tier AI/ML talent in Amsterdam.

ELLIS unit Amsterdam seeks to build on the city’s strengths by actively engaging with Amsterdam’s AI ecosystem and connecting local and regional actors to empower innovation in fundamental research.

Originally affiliated with the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and the unit has later been expanded to include the Vrije Universiteit (VU), and the Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica (CWI), which strengthens its position as an international hotspot for deep learning-powered research in AI. The unit is also connected to local partners, such as Science Park, Amsterdam AI, Amsterdam Data Science, all of whom lead the city in advancing the use of machine learning and AI. It is also greatly supported by the industry sponsors which are key stakeholders in the field. Through the collaboration, ELLIS unit Amsterdam works to close the gap between academia and industry to retain the next generation of AI researchers, and eliminate knowledge silos slowing technological and regulatory developments. Our sponsors support not just the unit, but the ELLIS Society mission to enable Europe to play a major, defining role in the current scientific and societal revolution, both benefiting from advancements and shaping their impact.

Our core research inspires us to work towards strengthening Amsterdam and Europe’s AI research capacity by connecting people and institutions, advancing excellent fundamental machine-learning research, developing and retaining talent, and fostering responsible AI innovation with societal impact, with the following key research topics:

• ML Foundations
• Natural Language Processing
• Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems (SIAS)
• Table Representation Learning 
• Computer Vision
• Information Retrieval
• ML for Health