Teaching
At Tilburg University, I teach the course "Computer Games" and in the CSAI master. In the CSAI bachelor, I teach the course "Data Structures and Algorithms". Im 2022, I coordinated the course "Programming & Algorithmic Thinking". I developed two extensive sets of notebooks for teaching Python, namely "Data Processing with Python" and "Computational Thinking with Python"; these notebooks are used in multiple courses in the CSAI and Data Science programs. Formerly, I taught the courses "Games and Social Simulations", "Data Processing" and "Data Processing Advanced" in the HAIT/Data Science master; and "Understanding Intelligence" and "Games for Artificial Intelligence" (together with Sander Bakkes) in the CIS bachelor. I also contributed to the courses "Business Information Technology", "Digital Media Research Tools", and "Inleiding HAIT" in the CIS bachelor. I supervise many bachelor, master, and PhD students.
Courses at the Open University
For the Open University, I taught the courses "Kunstmatige Intelligentie 1", "Kunstmatige Intelligentie 2", "Onderzoeksvaardigheden Kunstmatige Intelligentie", and "Artificial Intelligence for Games". I was also involved in bachelor and master thesis projects.
Other Courses
In 2009, I taught a five-day Summer course in "Artificial Intelligence for Games" for about 50 third and fourth-year students at Helsinki University. I also teach a two-day course on the same subject area for Dutch PhD students of the SIKS research school, and a similar course for PhD students of Tilburg University on request. I occasionally contribute to courses at other universities, such as Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam.
Past Courses at Maastricht University
At Maastricht University, I taught the courses "Logic", "Object-Oriented Modeling", and "Games & AI" of the Knowledge Engineering program. I was also involved in several student projects, and contributed to the Summer course in Data Mining.
Students
I guide several Bachelor, Master, and PhD students in their thesis projects.
- Bachelors at Tilburg University:
- New students in 2023: Svetoslav Ivanov, Vera Luksen, Rik Mol, Daniël Schot, Tim Tomljanović, Carthago Vlug.
- Matthijs Leenheer, Facial analysis in game playing (finished).
- Wynand Sijben, Dynamically Scripted Robots (finished).
- Marjolein de Vries, Morality and Cooperation in Agent Societies (finished).
- Jeffrey van der Linden, Increasing Security Awareness with Serious Games (finished).
- Sem Meereboer, Player Profiling in DOTA2 (finished).
- Wineke Sloos, Morality in Agent Societies (finished).
- Rick Smetsers, Neural Networks in Physical Lego Bots (finished).
- Matthijs de Regt, Occupational N-grams for Player Imitation (finished).
- Iris Balemans, Psychological Player Profiling in Fallout 3 (using a Fallout 3 mod (FOSE required); finished).
- Linda Stege, Serious Games in Education (finished).
- Tetske Avontuur, Player Modelling in Wargus (finished).
- Sonny Schreurs, Psychological Profiling of Game Players (finished).
- Masters at Tilburg University:
- Bart Kuipers, Predicting hatchability in commercial broiler breeder flocks using Deep Learning (finished).
- Carlo Mathijssen, Using machine learning to predict a successful run in Slay the Spire.
- Lieke Buuron, Predicting Conversion and Click Through Rates Based on Search Queries (finished).
- Luuk Verheij, Tension Prediction in Hearthstone (finished).
- Sonny van Veghel, Identifying Success Factors in Online Learning by Subgroup Discovery (finished).
- Robin Bredo, Where not to park your bike (finished).
- Rick van Hamond, Peak Emotions in First-Person Shooter games (finished)
- Stefan Marshall, Death prediction in CSGO (finished).
- Jesse van de Mond, Predicting user responses to push notifications (finished).
- Robbert Spaargaren, Early Game Win Prediction in League of Legends (finished).
- Bob Tuynman, Emotional Agents in Hide-and-seek games.
- Dimitris Vatsakis, Dixit AI (finished).
- Thomas van Vliet, Predicting the Life Satisfaction of online gamers with neural networks (finished).
- Tyra Monsch, Using tweets to predict impact on the stock market (finished).
- Harm van Driel, Rumble in the Jungle (finished).
- Jean-Paul Dingemanse, Road Safety improvement using on-board diagnostics (finished).
- Thijs Janssen, Social media and mental health (finished).
- Niels van de Laar, Public sentiment and the coronavirus pandemic (finished).
- Agner Piton, Peak-end effects in Hearthstone (finished).
- Alex Apostolov, Teaching computational thinking using Augmented Reality (finished).
- Teunis van der Hofstad, Explainable AI for image quality assessment (finished).
- Aron Varadi, Simulation to real world knowledge transfer (finished).
- Itoro Unang, AI for Scrabble (finished).
- Mathijs Leenheer, Determining player frustration through Facial Expression Analysis (finished).
- Marco Wedemeyer, Customer churn (finished).
- Letizia Minarini, Difference in playstyles in Tournaments and Solo Queues (finished).
- Joris van Abeelen, isMCTS for Take-5 (finished).
- Angelo Brouwers, Winner prediction in MOBA (finished).
- Justin Boon, A hybrid recommendation system for Steam (finished).
- Sander van Riel, Ranking prediction in PUBG (finished).
- Robin van Gerwen, Relation between motivation and game choice in board games (finished).
- Menno van Dijk, The liquidity premium in virtual financial markets (finished).
- Anouk Breugelmans, Culture and game choice in Steam (finished).
- Bram Ooms, Stress and serious games (finished).
- Marije Merckens, Criminal profiling (finished).
- Johan Björkroth, CRM in online social games (finished).
- Wesley van Westenbrugge, Analyzing game preference differences between continents (finished).
- Stijn Geraats, Match outcome in battle royale games (finished).
- Gerlof Bremmer, Cryptocurrency price development (finished).
- Laura Sulman, Positivity in online game chats (finished).
- Jeroen van Buren, Human decision making in game theory (finished).
- Lars Strijbos, Culture and play style in Counterstrike and Dota2 (finished).
- Prab Laoharojanaphan, a game for language learning (finished).
- Arjen Traas, Toxicity in games (finished).
- Max Schöttler, Temporal dependencies in recommender systems (finished).
- Bram Notten, Steam recommender systems (finished).
- Marco Unfer, Automatically extracting information from news media (finished).
- Johannes Barkhau, Pandora Intelligence -- discovering trends (finished).
- Denitsa Pesheva, Pandora Intelligence -- dealing with missing data (finished).
- Christa Janse, Digital footprint of game players (finished).
- Marjolein de Vries, Mining the Relationship between Culture and Play Style (finished).
- Mark Verschoor, Eating seeds as a pastime activity (on toxicity in gameplay behavior; finished)
- Irwan Wiradinata, Achievement-driven game players (finished).
- Miroslava Trnková, Social characteristics of game players (finished).
- Hanneke Kersjes, Emotional and personality models of game agents (finished).
- Stefan Methorst, Adapting a game to facial expressions of players (finished).
- Dhiratara Putri, The relationship between player quality and team quality in games (finished).
- Anne Sars, Recognizing Neuroticism in Gameplay Behavior (finished).
- Joël Grevelink, Transreality in Cybersecurity Games (finished).
- Cindy van Miltenburg, Increasing Awareness with a Serious Game (finished).
- Maxime von Bannisseht, Pandora II and Text Mining (finished).
- Rico van Lent, Gamification on Online Platforms (finished).
- Gerke van den Akker, The Effect of In-Game Advertising on Player Behavior (finished).
- Mateusz Bialas, Cultural Effects on Play Style (finished).
- Lucas Vergeest, Classifying Tweets with Neural Networks (finished).
- Hugo van Wissen, Predicting Decisions from Facial Observations (finished).
- Rein van Strien, Predicting Decisions from Facial Observations (finished).
- Khaoula Ouerfelli, Transmedia Storytelling Effects (finished).
- Karen Ebert, Transmedia Storytelling Effects (finished).
- Vincent Lichtenberg, Fuzzy Logic for Game Behavior (finished).
- Sophie Bressers, Pandora Model (finished).
- Linda Stege, Pandora Prediction Capabilities (finished).
- Iris Balemans, The Taxation Game (finished).
- Tetske Avontuur, Determining Player Skill in StarCraft II (finished, won the Leo Coolen award for her thesis).
- Jeff Schram, Culturally Aware BDI Agents (finished).
- Sonny Schreurs, Tuning a Game to a Player's Profile (finished).
- J.J. Vens, Simulation of Emergence in Social Networks (finished).
- Alexandra Guzga, Player Profiling for Entertainment (finished).
- Evi Joosten, Influencing Emotions in Games (using her Neverwinter Nights module; finished).
- Freek den Teuling, Preference-based Player Modelling (finished).
- Bachelors at Open University:
- Johan Eikelboom, Chatbots (finished).
- Kees van Winzum, Chatbots (finished).
- Erik Bloemers, Chatbots (finished).
- Gery Wauters, Crossings (finished).
- Martine Vanderveken, Crossings (finished).
- Masters at Open University:
- Reinier Beeckman, Player Modeling for Poker.
- Floris de Vooys, Cross-Entropy Learning in Credit Assessment (finished).
- Patrik Rombouts, Generation of Musical Motives (finished).
- José Bronswijk, Flexible Scheduling (finished).
- Ivo Klinkert, Satellite Tracking (finished).
- Rosanne Janssen, Classification of Treatments (finished).
- Bachelors at Maastricht University:
- Benjamin Schnieders, Automatic Scenario Creation (finished).
- Dean Hawkins, Adaptive Team Composition in RTS Games (finished).
- Matthijs Rohs, Opponent modeling in Civilization IV (finished).
- Antonie Valkenberg, Opponent modeling in World of Warcraft (finished).
- Irmin Auwerda, Online learning with dynamic scripting by a real-time strategy AI (finished).
- Kevin Moesker, Citadels (finished).
- Philip Kerbush, Learning unit values in Wargus (finished).
- Masters at Maastricht University:
- Bart Mehlkop, Adapting to Opponent Models in RTS Games (finished).
- Marcel van der Heijden, Dynamic Formations in RTS Games (finished).
- Maurice Bergsma, Adaptive Spatial Reasoning for Turn-Based Strategy Games (finished).
- Richard Arnoldussen, Adaptive teams in Neverwinter Nights (finished).
- Timor Timuri, Automatic rule ordering for dynamic scripting (finished).
- Maurice Urlings, Modelling task behaviour using hierarchical reinforcement learning (finished).
- Rob Collaris, an adaptive automatic pilot for RPGs (finished).
- Berend Berendsen, Evolutionary ethics in agent societies (finished).
- Marc Ponsen, Evolutionary learning of Wargus game AI (finished).
- Yvo Keuter, Neural networks in racing games (finished).
- Sander Bakkes, team-behaviour learning in Quake III (finished).
- Ramon Frissen, A sensorimotor model of mental rotation (finished).
- PhD students:
- Coming: PhDs in (1) games for value estimation, (2) Non-verbal language recognition, (3) Avatars adapting to humans, and (4) XAI for Learning methods on Graph Structured Data.
- Büşra Özgöde Yigin, Deep learning in biomedical applications (main supervisor: Görkem Saygili; also with Sharon Ong).
- Gianluca Guglielmo, Serious Games for Training (with Michal Klincewicz and Elisabeth Huis in 't Veld).
- Javad PourMostafa, Deep Learning for Machine Translation (main supervisor: Dimitar Shterionov).
- Charlotte Croucher, Locomotion in Virtual Reality (main supervisor: Wendy Powell; also with Travis Wiltshire).
- Phillip Brown, Simulator sickness and virtual reality interventions (main supervisor: Wendy Powell; also with Drew Hendrickson).
- Rowena Summerlin, The effect of product visualization in business (main supervisor: Wendy Powell; also with Eriko Fukuda).
- Parisa Shayan, Modeling user behavior in learning management systems (with Martin Atzmüller and Menno van Zaanen).
- Shujing Ke, General Intelligence Using Hypergraph Mining (with Boris Čule).
- Paris Mavromoustakos Blom, Player Affect Modelling and Video Game Personalisation (together with Sander Bakkes) (finished).
- Yaser Norouzzadeh Ravari, Player Behavior Modeling in Video Games (finished).
- Rianne Conijn, The Keys to Writing: A writing analytics approach to studying writing processes using keystroke logging (finished, cum laude; main supervisor: Menno van Zaanen).
- Armon Toubman, Calculated Moves (finished).
- Francesco di Giacomo, Metacasanova: A High-Performance Meta-Compiler for Domain-Specific Languages (finished).
- Shoshannah Tekofsky, You Are Who You Play You Are (finished).
- Mohamed Abbadi, Casanova 2, a domain specific language for general game development (finished).
- Ruud Mattheij, The Eyes Have It (finished).
- Peter de Kock, Anticipating Criminal Behavior (finished).
- Giuseppe Maggiore, Casanova: A Language for Game Development (finished).
- Giel van Lankveld, Reliable Adaptive Agents in Complex Environments (finished).
- Sander Bakkes, Rapid online learning for entertainment computing (finished).
- Mohamed Wahdan, Automatic formulation of the auditor's opinion (finished).