Prof. Frank van Harmelen

Professor Frank van Harmelen is professor of AI & Data in the Computer Science department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

A leader in the development of the Semantic Web, Frank helped to make Data on the web interpretable by machines through formal representations in AI.

As co-PI on the first European Semantic Web project he laid the foundations for the Web Ontology Language (OWL), now a worldwide standard with widespread commercial use, and co-architected Sesame, an RDF storage and retrieval engine, also in wide academic and industrial use.

This research spawned a vibrant international AI community working on Knowledge Graphs across industry and academia, and in 2012 Frank received the 10-year impact award at the International Semantic Web Conference, considered the most prestigious award in the field. Currently Frank is a principal investigator of the Hybrid Intelligence Centre, a 20m€, 10 year collaboration between researchers at 6 Dutch universities into AI systems that collaborate with people instead of replacing them.

Internationally recognized as an authority on Artificial Intelligence, Neuro-symbolic AI, Knowledge Graphs and Knowledge Representation, Frank is a Member of the Academia Europaea, Member of the Royal Netherlands Society of Sciences and Humanities, and a fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) He is a guest professor at the Wuhan University of Science and Technology (WUST) in Wuhan, China, and recently received the lifetime achievement award from the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI)

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