Role: Associate Professor (10%) – Senior researcher imec (100%)

Faculty / Department:

• Faculty of Engineering and Architecture & imec UGent / Department of Information Technology - IDLab
  
  

Research Interests: 

• Ontology engineering
• Hybrid AI, fusing Knowledge Graphs and machine learning
• Explainable AI
• Semantic technologies & reasoning
• Personalized & context-aware health
• Wearables & smartphone for daily life monitoring
• Digital healthcare interventions
• Chatbots for behavioral change

Short bio:

I am a part-time associate professor at the IDLab research group of Ghent University (since October 2019) and a full-time research manager and senior scientist at the imec research hub for nanotechnologies and digital technologies.

I received my PhD in Computer Science in August 2013 pertaining to knowledge discovery and management for eHealth applications by using ontologies and semantic reasoning. During this time, I worked on several eCare projects to improve the continuous care of patients in institutionalized care settings.

As a professor at Ghent University, I am part of the PREDICT and KnoWS research teams of IDLab. Within these teams my PhD students, post-docs and me perform research into a) deriving actionable insights from your decentralized data through semantic analytics, b) expressive semantic stream and distributed reasoning, c) the incorporation of expert knowledge in data analytics algorithms, d) hybrid AI, fusing semantic models and machine learning, and e) explainable AI by leveraging Knowledge Graphs. I am also particularly interested in methodologies for capturing domain knowledge from experts & using this knowledge to optimize intelligent agents and the way we interact with them. This research is mainly applied to the domains of predictive healthcare and industry 4.0 in order to realize context-aware and personalized decision support systems.

One of my passions is fostering collaboration with societal and industrial partners in interdisciplinary projects to valorize our research toward truly impactful applications. This is realized through a number of (government sponsored) projects, for which I set up and lead the trajectory from proposal, into project management and valorization and dissemination afterwards.