Everything Flo's on Floris den Hengst's Homepage

Our paper on ``Addressing Incomplete Data in Survival and Quality of Life Prediction: a Pancreatic Cancer Case Study" won the best paper award at AIME 2026 (AR ~20%) !

Throwback to this post about ICT.OPEN!

Today I gave a guest lecture for the course Human-interactive Agent Learning.

Small post to celebrate that I obtained my University Teaching Qualification.

We contributed a tutorial on doing real-world experiments involving humans and sequential decision making agents to a national PhD course on Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Hybrid Intelligence.

I spoke at ICT.OPEN 2025 about a joint work with Cas Oude Hoekstra on predicting conditional percentiles with fully transparent models using the pinball loss and symbolic regression.

Recently, I needed a logo for a project I am working.

Today I joined Bluesky, a social media platform that aims to put users front-and-centre again.

I will attend the 2024 BNAIC/BeNeLearn to present our work on guideline-reinforcement informed reinforcement learning in critical care.

I visited Verena Wolf’s Neuro-Mechanistic Modeling in Saarbrücken and met with her many interesting group members there to discuss RL, safety, formal methods and RL, and causality.

We have contributed papers to the health care workshop and demo track of the Hybrid Human AI Conference.

Teaching staff who are active in one of our English programmes must prove that their English level is at EFSET C1.

Our work on hashtag#task-oriented dialogue systems has been accepted at ACL’s 2024 NAACL Findings.

I contributed a talk on guideline-informed reinforcement learning with Annette ten Teije to the AI & Health Winter School organized by the VU Campus Center Artificial Intelligence & Health.

Today I succesfully defended my PhD. thesis Learning to Behave - Reinforcement Learning in Human Contexts.

For the past couple of years, I have always loved working with Msc. and Bsc. students.

Last week I attended the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Vienna.

Past week, I attended and assisted at the Reinforcement Learning Summer School organized by Vincent François-Lavet.

Gaussian Processes are a fascinating tool for usage in RL due to modelling uncertainty and data efficiency I briefly introduced GP’s and shown how/why they are used in RL Gaussian processes (GPs) are a fascinating tool in the machine learning toolbelt.

A paper on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for strategic workforce planning co-authored with Yannick Smit, Sandjai Bhulai and Ehsan Mehdad is accepted as a long paper at the LOD conference.

The paper Reinforcement Learning with Option Machines co-authored by me, Vincent François-Lavet, Mark Hoogendoorn and Frank van Harmelen is accepted as a long presentation (~3% acceptance rate) at IJCAI.

Reinforcement Learning has proven to be capable of outperforming humans on various tasks by interacting with and experimenting some environment.

Upcoming weekend will be a virtual conference on reinforcement learning (RL) in real-life.

Update 2020-06-27: this paper was presented as a `poster’(video) at the RL for Real Life virtual Conference.

Mickey, a master student I was co-supervising, recently published a paper based on his thesis work in ACM’s Conference for Human Information Interaction and Retrieval.

Today, my work is – very briefly – mentioned in a post by Nick Kivits.

In a previous post I explained how reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to make chatbots better from its experience with users.

I was recently asked to help organise a ‘music bingo’ for students of horseriding association BLOK.

Just returned from a lovely stay in Chania, Crete for the Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence, a yearly summer school by EurAI.

A couple of days ago, RL founding father Rich Sutton posted a blog post.

The value offering of most contemporary chatbot platforms consists of packaging state-of-art Automated Speech Recognition (ASR, or ‘speech-to-text’), Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Voice Synthesis into a comprehensive API.

I completed the SIKS course ‘Research Methods and Methodology in IKS’, spanning a wide range of topics such as research methods, Design Research, many issues involved with evaluation in ML and how the field of IR has a strong history of rigourous evaluati…

I just completed the course ‘Writing a Scientific Article’ at the VU Language Centre.

Today I completed the HPC course at VU University.

Little under three years ago, in March 2016, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm beat Lee Sedol, a pro player in a match of Go.