Projects

Coming soon: TRIFECTA (funding: European Research Council, ERC Consolidator)

January 2021 – December 2024: Culturally Aware AI (funding: Dutch Research Council, Artificial Intelligence Responsible Use)
The AI:CULT project addresses the gap between AI and our digital cultural heritage. Current state of the art AI cannot deal with the inherent richness, subjectivity and polyvocal nature of cultural heritage data in a way that does justice to the important role of the heritage institute as a trusted source of information. This project will allow heritage institutes to use AI in ways that align with their role in society: transparent, inclusive, and keeping the user in control. I’m the principal investigator.

January 2021 – December 2023: Odeuropa (funding; Horizon 2020)
Odeuropa will apply state-of-the-art AI techniques to cultural heritage text and image datasets spanning four centuries of European history, to identify and trace how ‘smell’ was expressed in different languages, with what places it was associated, what kinds of events and practices it characterised, and to what emotions it was linked. My role as project manager is to coordinate day-to-day logistics of the project and as a researcher I will co-develop NLP and Semantic Web technology to recognise and model references to smell.

January 2021 – December 2021: SABIO Social Bias Observatory (funding: Dutch Digital Heritage Network)
The SociAl BIas Observatory (SABIO) project is aimed at investigating bias in the digital collections of the members of the Dutch Digital Heritage Network. In this project, we investigate how collection managers and curators create and add metadata to collection objects, and how bias in these metadata can be detected using statistical models. We aim to create a knowledge graph on top of existing collection databases that makes prejudices and imbalances in the data explicit such that they can be addressed, as well as taken into account by users of the data. I’m the principal investigator on this project.

January 2021 – December 2021: Communicating the environmental impact of plant based recipes (funding: Alpro foundation)
This research produces a tool that calculates the calories, the ​biodiversity​, economic, and climate benefits of plant-based recipes​. This will increase food-climate awareness in consumers, offering them a means to ​investigate tradeoffs and ​integrate sustainable healthy food into different European food cultures​. Role: co-applicant.

October 2019 – October 2023: CA18209 – European network for Web-centred linguistic data science (funding: EU)
The main aim of this Action is to promote synergies across Europe between linguists, computer scientists, terminologists, and other stakeholders in industry and society, to investigate and extend the area of linguistic data science.

April 2018 – January 2019: CLARIAH Amsterdam Time Machine (funding: CLARIAH)
The Amsterdam Time Machine (ATM) is a research and development platform on the history of Amsterdam.

October 2017 – March 2019: EviDENce (funding: CLARIAH-eScience), KNAW Humanities Cluster
Although oral history and the study of ego documents both value these individual perspectives on history and its meaning, these research fields tend to operate separately. EviDENce explores new ways of analysing and contextualising historical sources by applying event modelling and semantic web technologies.

May 2017 – May 2018: SERPENS (funding: CLARIAH), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & KNAW Humanities Cluster
Historically, some animals have been perceived as threats by humans. These species were believed to carry diseases or harm crops and farm animals. SERPENS aims to study the historical impact of pest and nuisance species on human practices and changes in the public perception of these animals.

January 2016 – September 2017: CLARIAH (funding: NWO), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Computational Lexicology and Terminology Lab
The Dutch CLARIAH project aims to build a research infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. In Work Package 3 (Linguistics), tools were developed to aid researchers in analysing textual data.

March 2013 – January 2016:  NewsReader project (funding: EU FP7), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Computational Lexicology and Terminology Lab
In the NewsReader project (EU FP7), we try to reconstruct news stories from daily news streams. By extracting the who, what, where and when of each article and merging it with previously extracted knowledge, we aim to provide professional decision makers with a condensed but complete picture.

October 2009 – March 2013: Agora (funding: NWO CATCH), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Web and Media Group
Agora was aimed at facilitating and assessing the impact of digitally mediated public history in collaboration with Rijksmuseum and the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision.

September 2005 – September 2009: MITCH (funding: NWO CATCH), Tilburg University & Naturalis Biodiversity Center
My project was concerned with improving data quality and advanced knowledge presentation through (sometimes automatically induced) ontologies. The work in MITCH led to my PhD thesis titled “Accessing Natural History: Discoveries in Data Cleaning,Structuring, and Retrieval”