Students

PhD students

I currently supervise two PhD students at the ICAI OpenGov Lab:

Damiaan Reijnaers

Damiaan works on Advanced NLP for Open Government, focusing on explainable document representations. Damiaan is a dual PhD candidate and also works as an advisor at the organization for information management and the government of the Netherlands. Damiaan holds an MSc AI degree from UvA.

damiaan.nl

Maik Larooij

Maik works on Advanced Search for Open Government. Co-supervised with Maarten Marx. Maik built WooGLe (now WooZM) before joining the OpenGov Lab. Maik is a dual PhD candidate and works as an advisor at the organization for information management and the government of the Netherlands. Maik holds an MSc Computer Science joint degree from UvA/VU.

maiklarooij.nl

Bachelor and Master students

I enjoy supervising students at bachelor and master level. So far I’ve supervised students in AI, data science, information sciences, computer science, and computational science. These projects typically represent current ideas and attempts at novel research directions.

I currently supervise:

  • Robert van Straten (MSc Computer Science)
  • Coen Giezen (MSc AI)
  • Jonas Elzinga (MSc AI)

Alumni

I’ve supervised MSc thesis students across VU Amsterdam, UvA, Leiden University, Radboud University, and during my time at FD Mediagroep and Randstad. Several of these theses led to publications at peer-reviewed venues.

  • Oberon Berlage (2019, MSc): Improving automated segmentation of radio shows with audio embeddings
  • Anna Lőrincz (2022, MSc): Transfer learning for multilingual vacancy text generation
  • Adam Arafan (2022, MSc): End-to-End Bias Mitigation in Candidate Recommender Systems with Fairness Gates.
  • Sarah-Jane van Els (2022, MSc): Improving Fairness Assessments with Synthetic Data: a Practical Use Case with a Recommender System for Human Resources
  • Ninande Vermeer (2022, MSc): Using RobBERT and eXtreme Multi-Label Classification to Extract Implicit and Explicit Skills From Dutch Job Descriptions
  • Benjamin Platten (2022, MSc): Automated Personnel Scheduling with Reinforcement Learning and Graph Neural Networks
  • Yuxin Luo (2023, MSc): Enhancing Resume Content Extraction in Question Answering Systems through T5 Model Variants.
  • Spyros Avlonitis (2023, MSc): Career Path Recommendations for Long-term Income Maximization: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
  • Lois Rink (2024, MSc): Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Open-Ended HR Survey Responses

Interested in doing your thesis with me? Check out the OpenGov Lab for current opportunities, or reach out directl