The Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has reappointed Dr. Fang Liu of China by acclamation today as Secretary General of the UN Specialized Agency for a second three-year term, beginning 1 August 2018.

Dr Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, Assistant Professor at eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies, and 8 partners have been awarded the project 'BIAS: Mitigating Diversity Biases in the Labour Market', a large €4.7M Horizon Europe grant.

Iris Wuisman and Morshed Mannan of the Company Law department attended a European workshop on blockchain and the law at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence on 30 November 2017- 1 December 2017.

Marius Staring, Associate Professor at the LUMC has been awarded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funding for further development of image processing software Elastix

Technological developments never stop. Machines can already perform many tasks and in the future they will probably take over even more of the work we do. Which jobs could disappear and which will remain in the future? Olaf van Vliet, Professor of Economics at Leiden Law School, commented on these issues…

As of April 1, 2018, Erik Danen has been appointed as Professor of Cancer drug target discovery at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR). His discipline is cell biology of cancer, in which he focuses on the mechanisms underlying metastasis and therapy resistance.

The German professor of Information Systems and Statistics Heike Trautmann accepted the Pascal chair this month at LIACS, the computer science institute of Leiden University. Trautmann’s main research areas are evolutionary multiobjective optimisation and data science, in which LIACS is strong as we…

By spreading fake news via TV spots and Twitter with the use of Social Bots, Pascal professor Heike Trautmann is investigating the characteristics of fake news. She is calling on Leiden researchers to cooperate in the project.

On 13 June 2024, the University of Tuscia (Viterbo, Italy) hosted a doctoral seminar in the series 'Law and Artificial Intelligence', organised by the PhD programme in 'Law of European and Global Markets. Crisis, Rights, Regulation' and coordinated by Professor Rosa Ruggiero.

In this blog post, Linda Slapakova discusses the various roles that AI plays in counter-disinformation efforts, the prevailing shortfalls of AI-based counter-disinformation tools and the technical, governance and regulatory barriers to their uptake, and how these could be addressed to foster the uptake…

Here you can find the recordings of previous Florence Nightingale Colloquia.

The Cyber Security lecturers are scholars and lecturers of Leiden University, Delft University of Technology and The Hague University of Applied Sciences.

The new government needs to look further ahead, says environmental scientist Rutger Hoekstra. ‘We keep pushing forward big dossiers like demographic ageing, climate and migration. Even though we know they play a big role in our future.’ Hoekstra therefore hopes that the new coalition agreement will…

Computers are increasingly able to accomplish tasks that are difficult for human experts, such as diagnosing diseases or detecting credit card fraud. While the earliest examples of computational thinking can be traced back to the 13th century, according to Holger Hoos, Leiden Professor of Machine Learning,…

The biweekly Lunch Time Seminar is an online only event, but it is not publicly accessible in real-time. If you would like to attend one of the upcoming sessions, please send an email to sails@liacs.leidenuniv.nl.

An overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2020, as well as special appointments at Leiden University and other institutions.

Connect art and academia at ACPA

In collaboration with the Honours Academy at Leiden University, Eduard Fosch-Villaronga and Hadassah Drukarch from eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies, coordinated a Pre-University Class on Robot Law.

A consortium of research groups, including that of LACDR professor Erik Danen, will use an NWO Perspective grant of nearly five million euros to build a universal standard for organ-on-chip models. They aim to stimulate the application of these chips in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industry. Danen…

With the aid of artificial intelligence (AI), care professionals at the LUMC (Leiden University Medical Center) are able to calculate quickly and accurately whether a coronavirus patient has suffered serious lung damage. They do this by putting a CT scan through the AI software of the CAD4COVID-CT p…

On 10 May 2021, Melanie Fink and Barbora Budinská published their views on recent developments in the areas of EU regulation of Artificial Intelligence and the Banking Union respectively as Op-Eds on EU Law Live.

Artificial intelligence systems are smart. They can recognize patterns better than humans, for example. Yet humans are still very much needed. How can you better steer those AI systems? LIACS lecturer Jan van Rijn wrote a book about this together with a number of colleagues. We asked him a few quest…

Linguist Wataru Uegaki received an NWO Grant of 58400 Euro for his research project 'In search of semantic universals in the modal domain'. With this money Wataru can compile a database and organise workshops. An interview with Wataru:

The European Union has invested ten million euros in the so-called iNEXT-Discovery consortium. The goal of this new consortium is to enable European researchers to extend innovative structural biology research. The Netherlands Centre for Electron Nanoscopy (NeCEN) is also part of iNEXT-Disovery, which…

Artificial intelligence systems are smart. They can recognize patterns better than humans, for example. Yet humans are still very much needed. How can you better steer those AI systems? LIACS lecturer Jan van Rijn wrote a book about this together with a number of colleagues. We asked him a few quest…

Three of our researchers have been awarded a certificate for receiving enough downloads to be in the top 10% of papers in 2022

Toxys, Leiden University and Leiden University Medical Center have agreed immediately to commercialise and also develop further the ToxProfiler technology invented at the two institutions. ToxProfiler allows for rapid toxicity hazard identification of novel and existing drugs, chemicals, and other substances.…

Professor Antje Wessels has received an NWO Open Competition grant to research fragmentary texts.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has made a subsidy of 17 million euros available to further develop a Netherlands network for electron microscopy (NEMI). The network comprises five UMCs and eight universities, with Utrecht in the coordinating role. From Leiden, the Institute…

On 21 March The Netherlands Centre for Electron Nanoscopy (NeCEN) hosted the Life Sciences Café. Around 60 people from neighbour companies from the Leiden BioScience Park visited the facility for cryo-electron microscopy to get a glimpse behind the scenes. Head of NeCEN Ludo Renault believes it was…

Last week, the first seven professionals successfully completed the new Leiden Legal Technologies Programme (LLTP). They received their certificates during a festive ceremony. Smiling faces all around for founder Jaap van den Herik, Programme Director Nikol Hopman, and The Hague alderman Saskia Bruines.…

Jacques J. M. van Gent (8 June 1932 - 26 March 2021) was director of Leiden University Library from 1983 to 1993. He was librarian in a time of transition and, as director, was able to benefit from the new library building on the Witte Singel. Van Gent was a very different kind of manager from his predecessor,…

Cancelled trains, massive queues at Schiphol Airport, nursery closures and long waiting times for health care. These are all the results of labour shortages. Economist Lars van Doorn can see some possible solutions but has some less optimistic news too.

Een internationaal consortium onder leiding van Olaf van Vliet heeft een Horizon Europe subsidie van 3,4 miljoen euro gewonnen. In het onderzoek staat centraal hoe wereldwijde sociale veranderingen zoals migratie, digitalisering en de klimaattransitie de arbeidsmarkt beïnvloeden en wat daar de gevolgen…

In June 2016, Janine Geerling and Marjo de Graauw were awarded a LUF-grant of €10.000 to design a digital laboratory support tool for the 2nd year BFW practical course on biochemistry. Now the pilot has kicked of with all 240 BFW Bsc students!

An organized overview of the current global fungal diversity, that is what Irene Martorelli and colleagues try to achieve with the new MycoDiversity Database (MDDB) she builds in collaboration with Naturalis Biodiversity Center. The new database will make it easier and quicker to observe which fungi…

eLaw in collaboration with the TU Delft Design for Values Institute finalized the research on “Artificial Intelligence and Ethics at the Dutch Police” by providing the whitepaper highlighting requirements for the responsible use of AI at the Police and the long-term research strategy.

The Applied Machine Learning Days AMLD is a global platform that brings together experts and participants from over 40 countries across industry, academia, and government in the field of Machine Learning. In this year’s edition, members of the BIAS project organized a track around the topic Fairness…

‘Rudy van Vliet is always willing to go that extra mile to help us,’ is what students say about him. The lecturer in the Computer Science bachelor’s programme not only teaches his regular courses but also offers additional classes to prepare students for programming competitions. His dedication to students…

As a result of globalisation, migration and technological advances, politicians have to make complex choices about social security and labour market policy. Professor by special appointment Olaf van Vliet will speak about this topic in his inaugural lecture on 7 June.

‘We hope our paper highlights the possibilities and benefits of including artificial intelligence in quantum physics to do new discoveries.’ Vedran Dunjko of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science contributed to a paper that was published in PNAS last year and now received a Cozzarelli Prize…

From 13 to 16 July, Leiden will host the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF), the largest multidisciplinary scientific conference in Europe. Lars van Doorn from Leiden Law School will give a presentation.

Researcher and lecturer Susana Valdez investigates how migrants make use of online translation technology in medical situations. Her research suggests that they often encounter obstacles when using machine translation in these settings. Potential problems include a lack of understanding or trust.

Making all those things we normally cannot see visible is the challenge that fascinates Fons Verbeek, Leiden's new Professor of Computational Bio-Imaging. Contributions from chemistry, optics and in particular computational sciences to making and processing these images give greater insight into the…

They never cross our minds until, that is, they become damaged and then they’re a huge problem: our sewers. Their maintenance could be much faster and more accurate, PhD candidate Dirk Meijer has discovered. Algorithms are also proving to be a godsend deep underground.

On Friday 10 December 2021, the Center for Law and Digital Technologies (eLaw) of the Leiden Law School, hosted its annual Research Colloquium exploring the theme 'Law Gone Digital'. The event gathered presentations by eLaw PhD candidates and professors on a wide range of topics at the interface of…

There are more molecules that could conceivably be candidate drugs than there are stars in the universe. How can we ever efficiently identify those molecules? Professor of AI and Medicinal Chemistry, Gerard van Westen: ‘I’m going to use artificial intelligence as the co-pilot to make an automated search.’…

Erik Danen is looking at how to inhibit tumours that do not respond well to medicine – and he is making some headway. The Professor of Cancer Drug Target Discovery studies the interaction between tumour cells and their surroundings. Inaugural lecture on Friday 10 May.

Two of eLaw’s Advanced Masters students, Dimitra Laskari and Vasilis Xynoglas, presented their research on the Metaverse and Personal Digital Twins at the Neurocognition and the Reproduction of Space conference in Shanghai, China. The students presented on the rules for the Metaverse under the GDPR…

Although sugars are widely used in biological and medical research, their synthesis is still badly understood. Jeroen Codée has received a Vici grant of 1.5 million euros for systematically studying the production of sugars. ‘I want to genuinely understand the reactions.’