Kurt Driessens' (lat. Homo Ludens) Home Page

Webographic Location:

Catholic University of Leuven
Computer Science Departement
Machine Learning Group

Contact Information:

      Kurt Driessens
      Department of Computer Science
      Catholic University of Leuven
      Celestijnenlaan 200A
      B3001 Heverlee, Belgium
      phone : + 32 16 32 7741
      e-mail : clicky

Education:

• 1985-1991: High School, mathematical direction, St-Gabriel College, Boechout, Belgium
• 1991-1992: High School Exchangeprogram with Youth for Understanding (YFU), Edmond Memorial High School, Edmond, Oklahoma, USA
• 1992-1994: Candidate in Engineering, K.U.Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
• 1994-1997: Masters Degree in Engineering : Computer Science, K.U.Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
• 1997-May 2004: PhD. in Applied Science, K.U.Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, Dissertation with the title: "Relational Reinforcement Learning"

Professional Activities:

• October 2007 - present: Post doctoral research fellow of the FWO (Research Foundation - Flanders)
  • Daily supervision of two/three PhD students
  • Responsible for the Action- and Activity Learning Special Interest Group
  • Co-responsible for the courses: Wetenschapscommunicatie (Eng. Scientific Communication) and Machine Learning (incl. student project)
  • Board member of the Faculty of Applied Sciences magazine: GeniaaL (in Dutch)
• July 2006 - September 2007: Post doctoral researcher at the K.U.Leuven
• October 2005 - June 2006: Post doctoral researcher for K.U.Leuven Research and Development on a project with Alcatel, Belgium
• October 2004 - September 2005: Post Doctoral Researcher at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
• July 2004 - September 2004: Visiting Researcher at the Institut Jozef Stefan, Ljubljana, Slovenia
• 1997 - June 2004: Research Assistant and PhD Student at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
  • Teaching assistant for courses including a 1st year programming course (Scheme and Java), 'Machine Learning & Inductive Inferences', 'Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computing' and 'Artificial Intelligence'
  • Team-leader for the KULRoT RoboCup-soccer-team (Software League) from 1997 till 1999
  • Supervision of 2nd year student projects including: 'Object-oriented design and implementation of a reinforcement learning program' and 'Software implementation of the Roborally boardgame'
  • Supervision of Master's Thesis students.
• July 2001: Invited Speaker at ACAI 2001 Agent Summer School in Prague
• March 1999 & November 2001: Visiting lecturer at the University of Zambia for the course 'Machine Architecture & Operating Systems'

Publications:

Reviewing and Program Committee Membership:

• Member of the editorial board of the Machine Learning Journal
• Co-Chair of the Workshop on Relational Reinforcement Learning at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Banff, Canada (2004).
• Chair of the Workshop on Rich Representations for Reinforcement Learning at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Bonn, Germany (2005).
• Co-Chair of the Workshop on Transfer Learning for Complex Tasks at the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Chicago, Illinois, USA (2008).
• Area Chair for:
  • International Conference on Machine Learning (2009)
  • European Conference on Machine Learning (2006, 2007)
• Member of Program Committee for:
  • International Conference on Machine Learning (2005, 2006, 2008)
  • European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (2008, 2009)
  • AAI (2007)
  • International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2009)
  • Asian Conference on Machine Learning (2009)
  • International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming (2005, 2009)
  • Belgian-Dutch Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2005, 2007, 2008, 2009)
  • European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (2008)
  • Symposium on Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005)
  • International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (2008)
  • Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (2008)
• Reviewer for the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (2008)
• Reviewed for journals: JAIR, IEEE SMC, JMLR, JCSR, ...

Hobbies:

• Taking pictures (Photography sounds much too serious for what I do)
• Raising a two year old
• Role-Playing (D&D player, Call of Cthulhu (Delta Green) keeper & player)
• Boardgames (BloodBowl, RoboRally, ...)
• Miniature Painting
• Kiting

Why I will never buy another Dell computer.