Jan van Eijck has been appointed professor of Computational Semantics at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) on a special chair set up by the Stichting Bèta Plus, as of 1 November 2011.
Van Eijck is a senior researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam and was, until recently, part-time professor of Computational Linguistics at UiL-OTS (Research Institute for Language and Speech) in 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.
For more information, see http://homepages.cwi.nl/~jve/.
Source: ILLC. Picture: CWI
