Filip Ilievski

• Assistant Professor of Commonsense AI, Sr. (UD1), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• Faculty, Learning and Reasoning Group
• Affiliated Scientist, USC Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI)
• Affiliated Scientist, Amsterdam Sustainability Institute (ASI)
• Scientific Coordinator, Digital Sustainability Institute (DiSC)
• Coordinator, Situated AI (BSc Minor)
• Research Assistant Professor, USC Computer Science (2022-2023)
• Research Scientist and Research Lead, USC Information Sciences Institute (2019-2023)
• PhD, Vrije University Amsterdam (2015-2019)
• Research Visitor, Carnegie Mellon University (2017)
• MSc, Vrije University Amsterdam (2013-2015)
• BSc, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University Skopje (2009-2013)
• Areas: Commonsense Reasoning, Neuro-Symbolic AI, Analogy, AI for Social Good

Open positions

I am currently growing my team at VU Amsterdam. I like collaborating with strong students passionate about human-centric AI with common sense and state-of-the-art technologies like language models and neuro-symbolic systems.

Primarily, I am hiring PhD students and Postdocs for my new personal cross-disciplinary project, “Human-Centric AI with Common Sense,” which is funded by NWO AiNed’s career program. The topics focus on value-aware AI, analogical abstraction, and developing world models with common sense. The calls for these positions are ongoing (some have been closed, and the rest are/will be open).

Please apply if you are interested in these topics and would like to work with me as a PhD student or a Postdoc. If you can’t find (an adequate) a call where you can apply, please email me, as the next position is likely coming out soon.

News

• I was interviewed for the BBC article When robots can’t riddle: What puzzles reveal about the depths of our own minds . The research I described was conducted with Koen Kraaijveld, Yifan Jiang, and Kaixin Ma. The article is part of the series “AI v. the Mind,” which explores “the limits of cutting-edge AI and learns a little about how our own brains work along the way.”
• I am teaching two courses this Fall: Conversational AI (BSc) and The Social Web (MSc).
• Welcome to Hossein Khojasteh, who started as a PhD focusing on analogy and abstraction on September 1, 2024.
• Welcome to Kaan Aslan, who joined my team on September 1 to work as an RA on our new project on knowledge-driven AI for sustainable policies until February 2025.
• I am chairing The First Workshop on Analogical Abstraction in Cognition, Perception, and Language (Analogy-ANGLE) at IJCAI 2024 in August.
• On May 2nd and 3rd, I hosted Wael AbdAlmageed at VU Amsterdam. Wael gave a talk entitled Truth Decay - Plausible Deniability: The Liar’s Dividend and met with members of the AI groups at the VU and UvA.
• In late April, I visited the Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST) and several universities in Tokyo and Sendai. During this trip, I talked about commonsense AI for good at JST and AIRC, and we explored future collaborations.

• In April 2024, I submitted the book ``Human-centric AI with Common Sense’’ to the Springer Nature Synthesis series. This is an invited publication and should be published in December 2024.

• I am co-chairing the Generative NeuroSymbolic AI (GeNeSy) workshop at ESWC 2024.
• I am organizing a Dagstuhl seminar on Generalization by Humans and Machines from 5th to 8th of May 2024. We have 30 participants from various disciplines, including machine learning, neuro-symbolic AI, computer vision, natural language processing, and cognitive psychology.
• Best student paper award for Prateek at K-CAP for our work Knowledge-enhanced Agents for Interactive Text Games.