The short (compressed) version

Matthijs likes data, patterns, algorithms, and information theory. He strives for data mining and machine learning methods and results that are principled, interpretable, and exploit existing knowledge.

The longer version

Matthijs is full professor and group leader at the LIACS, the computer science and AI institute of Leiden University. He is programme director of LIACS' Master programmes (Computer Science, Creative Intelligence & Technology, and the Business Studies specialisation) and a member of the LIACS Management Team. He is affiliated with SAILS and DSRP, the university-wide research programmes for artificial intelligence (AI) and data science. His primary research interests are exploratory data mining and interpretable machine learning: how can we enable domain experts to explore and analyse their data, to uncover patterns and make predictions, and—ultimately—discover novel knowledge?

For this it is important that methods and results are explainable to domain experts, who may not be data scientists. His signature approach is to define and identify patterns that matter, i.e., succinct descriptions that characterise relevant structure present in the data. Which patterns matter strongly depends on the data and task at hand, hence defining the problem is one of the key challenges in his research. Information theoretic concepts such as the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle have proven very useful to this end. Matthijs is also interested in interactive data mining, i.e., involving humans in the loop. Finally, he is interested in fundamental data mining research for real-world applications, both in science (e.g., life sciences, social sciences) and industry (e.g., manufacturing and engineering, aviation), as this is the best way to show that the theory works in practice.

Bio

Matthijs was previously associate professor (2020-2026), (tenure track) assistant professor (2017-2020), and senior researcher (2015-2017) at Leiden University. Before coming to Leiden, he was a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven (2011-2015) and Universiteit Utrecht (2009-2011). He defended his Ph.D. thesis, titled Patterns that Matter, in February 2010, at Universiteit Utrecht. He won several best paper and reviewer awards at international conferences and was awarded NWO Rubicon, FWO Postdoc, NWO TOP2, and NWO TTW Perspectief grants. He is General Chair of the IDA Council and Action Editor for the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal. Further, he co-organised a number of international conferences and workshops, and co-lectured tutorials on 'Information Theoretic Methods in Data Mining'.

More information, including CV, at www.patternsthatmatter.org