Do you only see news about Britney Spears popping up on a newspaper's website? Then there's probably an algorithm gone haywire. How do you safeguard an editor's journalistic mission if automated algorithms determine what you, the reader, get to see? Postdoc Max van Drunen investigated so-called "news personalization.

Prof. Wybren Jan Buma of Molecular Photonics at the Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences will take part in research using the new Dutch quantum supercomputer. Together with Prof. Luuk Visscher of Theoretical Chemistry at VU University he has just been granted funding through the National Growth Fund programme Quantum Technology, for the quantum simulation of molecular mirror images.

From February 2023, Yiddish will be taught at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) again. As a result, the UvA will be the only university in the Netherlands where this language, which is an important key to understanding Jewish history, is taught.

In recent weeks, demonstrations against collaboration with Shell have been held at various universities. An occupation at Erasmus University was broken up, while a similar action is still in progress at TU Eindhoven. At the UvA, Milieudefensie (the Dutch branch of Friends of the Earth) placed a pumpjack on campus. What is the UvA actually doing?

The EU's Horizon Europe programme granted a budget of €4 million for three years for the ENEXA (Efficient Explainable Learning on Knowledge Graphs) project on explainable artificial intelligence. The UvA will receive €521.162. The INDElab of the Informatics Institute led by Paul Groth will focus on the creation of knowledge graph extraction pipelines and the co-construction of explanations in the project.

Comparing ourselves favorably to others is something we all do. And we also stimulate it in our children; for example, as we praise them when they outperform others. But social comparisons can lead to a constant desire for superiority over others and that underlies narcissism. Çisem Gürel, PhD researcher in Child Development and Education, studied the potential of an alternative: comparing one's present self to one's past self.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope just scored another first: a molecular and chemical profile of a distant world's skies. This is shown in five new articles by an international team of scientists, including Jean-Michel Désert, Hinna Shivkumar and Saugata Barat from the University of Amsterdam are soon to be published in leading science magazines.

Is the inside of a plant cell more like a liquid or a solid? While this may sound like an odd question, research carried out at the University of Amsterdam demonstrates it can be either, depending on how much light you shine on it. Chloroplasts within plant cells constitute an active form of matter that undergoes dramatic phase transitions.

Many surfaces get slippery when wet. Some surfaces have the opposite behaviour: they get less slippery. UvA researchers have now shed light on why this is the case. Hydrogen bonds between the surface and the water turn out to play an important role.

Researchers of the University of Amsterdam, together with colleagues at the University of Queensland and the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, have developed a strategy for assessing the toxicity of chemicals using machine learning.

Professor of Military Law Marten Zwanenburg is examining the law related to military and defense in his chair. For example, may military astronauts be made prisoners of war or do these "representatives of humanity" deserve protection? In his oration on Dec. 14, Zwanenburg will address the legal questions surrounding the use of new military technology.

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam have developed a model that can accurately predict the current migration routes of migratory birds. This offers the possibility of taking adequate measures at the right time when birds are at risk from air traffic or infrastructure. The researchers published their work in the scientific journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution by the end of October.

When current machine learning systems are trained on a dataset of images, they struggle to learn from examples that don't occur often. A UvA PhD candidate now came up with an elegant and easy to implement solution to this problem.

The Data Science Centre, part of the University Library, is excited to host this event in Amsterdam with our International Advisory Board members on Friday 24 March 2023.