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:
 - Michael Pavlik, Train Schedule Optimization (finished).
 - Guido Morera, PCG via Latent Variable Evolution (finished).
 - Ismail El Addouti, Transfer Learning for Cross-Location of PV Panel Energy Production (finished).
 - Ena Čuturić, Eyes and Empathy (finished).
 - Andrei Radu Cristescu, Movement and motion sickness in VR (finished).
 - Svetoslav Ivanov, Emergence of complex behavior during multi-agent reinforcement learning (finished).
 - Vera Luksen, Just Dance performance evaluation with skeletal data (finished).
 - Rik Mol, Prediction of Premier League football match outcomes (finished).
 - Carthago Vlug, Implementing MCTS in a Pokémon battle based environment (finished).
 - 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:
 - Ebenezer Tafese, Classification by committeeL early detection of dementia using model ensembling (finished).
 - Franklin Evers, Classifying the sentiment of product reviews using multiple vectorization methods (finished).
 - Kimberly Zimmerman, Predicting work-life balance (finished).
 - Koen van Berkel, Predicting round outcomes in Rainbow Six Siege.
 - Ruben van Beek, Predicting bankruptcy and financial stability while handling data imbalances (finished)
 - Bart Kuipers, Predicting hatchability in commercial broiler breeder flocks using Deep Learning (finished).
 - 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).
 - 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:
 - Rob Camstra, Agent models for escalation prediction (main supervisor: Roy Lindelauf).
 - Bettina Soos, XAI for learning methods on Graph Structured Data (main supervisor: Çiçek Güven; also with Gonzalo Napoles)
 - Kamyab Ghorbanpour, Games for moral improvement (main supervisor: Michal Klincewicz; also with Paris Mavromoustakos-Blom)
 - Bosong Ding, Large Non-verbal Language Models for robotics (main supervisor: with Giacomo Spigler; also with Murat Kirtay)
 - Büşra Özgöde Yigin, Deep learning in biomedical applications (main supervisor: Görkem Saygili).
 - Javad PourMostafa, Deep Learning for Machine Translation (main supervisor: Dimitar Shterionov).
 - Daniel de Pascale, Open Source Cyber-Threat Intelligence (main supervisor: Willem-Jan van den Heuvel; also with Damian Tamburri) (submitted).
 - Rowena Summerlin, The effect of product visualization in business (main supervisor: Wendy Powell; also with Eriko Fukuda) (submitted).
 - Gianluca Guglielmo, Serious Games for Training (with Michal Klincewicz and Elisabeth Huis in 't Veld) (submitted).
 - Charlotte Croucher, Exploration in Virtual Reality: Thematic Analysis of the Natural Walking Literature and Examination of Virtual Environment Design (main supervisor: Wendy Powell; also with Travis Wiltshire).
 - Phillip Brown, New Perspectives on Accurately Measuring Cybersickness and Pain in Immersive Virtual Reality (main supervisor: Wendy Powell; also with Drew Hendrickson) (finished).
 - Parisa Shayan, Modeling user behavior in learning management systems (with Martin Atzmüller and Menno van Zaanen) (finished).
 - 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).
 
