Rineke Verbrugge is the project leader. She received a M.Sc. (cum laude) in 1988, followed in 1993 by a Ph.D in Logic and Foundations of Mathematics from the University of Amsterdam. Subsequently, she was post-doc at the Universities of Prague and Gothenburg, and Assistant Professor at MIT in Cambridge (MA) and the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. During her time at MIT she transfered from mathematical logic to artificial intelligence, focusing on logics for multi-agent systems. From 1997 onwards, she has worked at the University of Groningen’s Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Engineering, since 2009 as full professor of Logic and Cognition.
Rineke Verbrugge has published a large number of research papers and some books. She is member of the editorial board of Journal of Philosophical Logic and Associate editor of the Journal of Logic, Language and Information. She has acted as program or organizational chair for several conferences and a summer school. In 2008, Rineke Verbrugge was awarded an NWO Vici grant. In 2009, she was awarded the Educator of the Year Award of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the University of Groningen.
Burcu Arslan is a PhD student at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen. She obtained a MSc in cognitive science. In this project, she studies higher-order social cognition in children by using behavioral experiments, computational cognitive models and neurophysiological methods.
Cédric Dégremont is a post-doc at the Institute of Artificial Intellgence at the University of Groningen. He obtained a PhD at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam and an MA in philosophy at the University of Lille. His research in the project is concerned with the formal modeling of epistemic, interactive and strategic reasoning.
Ben Meijering is a PhD student at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen. He obtained a MSc in psychology (Brains and Behavior) and artificial intelligence (Human-Machine Communication). In this project, he studies higher-order social cognition in adults. His research methods include experiments, and computational cognitive models.
Daniel van der Post is a post-doc at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence and the Behavioural Ecology and Self-Organization group at the University of Groningen. In the project he will be studying the evolution of social cognition and theory of mind using individal-based models (agent-based models) with structured environments. The emphasis is on the feedback between self-organizing group-level phenomena evolve and individual-level cognition. Daniel received his PhD on emergence of cultural transmission of diet preferences at the Theoretical Biology and Bioinformatics department, Utrecht University with Prof. Paulien Hogeweg. This work showed how traditional inheritance of diet preference as well as cumulative cultural diet improvement could arise as a side-effect of grouping through self-organizing processes without active social learning mechanisms. Subsequently Daniel conducted a post-doc at the Courant Research Center Evolution of Social Behaviour in Dirk Semmann’s group working on the evolution of cooperative foraging and predator avoidance via grouping.
Jakub Szymanik is a post-doc at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen. In the project he studies the cognitive and computational constraints on the social interaction by combining logic with experimental studies. His research interests include applied logic, cognitive science, mathematical linguistics, complexity theory, psycholinguistics, philosophy, and any combination of these. Jakub received a PhD at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam. In the dissertation and the following publications he has been investigating the computational complexity of natural language quantifiers and its influence on language processing. Subsequently, he was a postdoc researcher at the Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University. In the meantime he was also briefly teaching at the Utrecht University and consulting for a company in machine translation. He obtained an MA (cum laude) in philosophy at the Warsaw University.
Harmen de Weerd is a PhD student at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen. In this project, he studies the possible evolutionary advantages of higher-order theory of mind through computational simulations of multi-agent systems.