Maarten de Rijke

Maarten de Rijke serves as Distinguished University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval at the University of Amsterdam and Director of the Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI). His academic journey includes MSc degrees in Philosophy and Mathematics (both cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science. His research focuses on developing trustworthy technology to connect people to information, particularly in search engines, recommender systems, and conversational assistants. As founding director of ICAI since 2018, he leads a national network of AI labs connecting academia, industry, and government. His contributions have earned him numerous accolades, including membership in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Tony Kent Strix Award, and the Keith van Rijsbergen Award. He has supervised nearly 100 PhD students and published over 1,100 papers. Beyond academia, he has helped generate over 200 million euros in project funding and served as VP of Personalization and Relevance at Ahold Delhaize. His work spans multiple research areas, including information retrieval, artificial intelligence, and human-centered computing, with particular emphasis on developing self-learning search engines and recommender systems that can adapt to user behavior.