Articificial Intelligence

Why study at VU University Amsterdam?

This programme is a pioneer in the development of intelligent systems. As a Master's student, you will be given the opportunity to work on advanced information systems at a wide range of companies and institutions. Some recent examples include:

• Semantic navigation on overheid.nl (the main Dutch government website)
• A personal 'quit assistant' to help people give up smoking 
• In cooperation with Philips, adaptive personal music choices during sports training.
• New forms of online publication for Elsevier
• A knowledge system to predict problems with Amsterdam's trams and other public transport
• An intelligent opponent that is able to antipate on player's actions in a real time action game.

Examples of courses:

Knowledge Management and Modelling
In Knowledge Management and Modelling, you will learn what kind of organizational aspects are important for knowledge management. The course also focuses on the question of how knowledge can be described with the support of modern information-modeling techniques. The notion of pattern based knowledge modeling is a key issue in the knowledge management process.

Intelligent Web Applications
Most of the information on the web is designed to be suitable for human consumption: the structuring principles are weak, many different kinds of information co-exist, and most of the information is presented as free text. However, with the increasing size of the web and the availability of new technologies such as mobile applications or smart devices, there is a growing need for making the information on the World Wide Web accessible to computer programs which search, filter, convert, interpret, and summarize the information for the benefit of the user.

Behaviour dynamics
This course teaches analysis and modelling of the dynamics of behaviour in Artificial, Biological, Cognitive and Social systems. Behavioural dynamics occurs in different forms, contexts and complexity. During the course examples of such behaviour are studied coming from software systems (e.g., knowledge- and agent-based systems), cognition (e.g., the use of beliefs, desires and intentions, complex reasoning tasks) and organisation theory (e.g., organisational change). The dynamics of behaviour of such systems is analysed (including verification and validation), modelled and simulated in this course using different techniques and tools.

Research projects and publications
All students are required to do a research project. This project may be conducted through one of our three AI research groups, namely Agent Systems, Computational Intelligence or Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.

Examples of research projects: http://www.cs.vu.nl/en/sec/ai/projects.html
Research publications: http://www.cs.vu.nl/en/sec/ai/publications.html