Curriculum vitae

Matthijs is full professor of Explainable Machine Learning at LIACS, the computer science and AI institute of Leiden University. He is group leader of the Explanatory Data Analysis group and a member of the LIACS management team. Further, he is programme director of LIACS' Master programmes in Computer Science and Creative Intelligence & Technology, as well as the Faculty of Science Business Studies specialisation and the Artificial Intelligence & Business minor.

Matthijs likes data, patterns, algorithms, and information theory. He strives for data mining and machine learning methods and results that are principled, interpretable, and incorporate knowledge.

Matthijs was previously associate professor at Leiden University from March 2020 until his promotion to full professor in 2026, (tenure track) assistant professor from September 2016 to February 2020, and senior researcher from September 2015 to August 2016. Before coming to Leiden, he was a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven (2011-2015) and Universiteit Utrecht (2009-2011). He defended his Ph.D. thesis, titled Patterns that Matter, in February 2010, at Universiteit Utrecht. He won several best paper and reviewer awards at international conferences and was awarded NWO Rubicon, FWO Postdoc, NWO TOP2, and NWO TTW Perspectief grants. He is General Chair of the IDA Council and Action Editor for the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal. Further, he co-organised a number of international conferences and workshops, and co-lectured tutorials on 'Information Theoretic Methods in Data Mining'.

Research topics

• Exploratory data mining
• Explainable and interpretable machine learning
• Pattern mining, pattern-based modelling
• Information theory for data mining
• Human-guided, interactive data mining and machine learning
• Subgroup discovery, exceptional model mining
• Multidisciplinary data science (health care, high-tech systems, ...)
• Data science, artificial intelligence

More on the website of the Explanatory Data Analysis group

Grants

• TTW Perspectief research programme Integration of data-driven and model-based engineering in future industrial technology with value chain optimization (co-PI; 5.7 M€; NWO, 2020 – 2026).
• TOP grant (module 2) Human-Guided Data Science by Interactive Model Selection (PI; 249 k€; NWO, 2019 – 2024).
• LUMC PhD grant AI for Neuroscience (co-PI; 230 k€; LUMC, 2020 – 2024).
• Sanquin PhD project Data Science for State-of-the-Art Blood Banking (co-PI; 230 k€; Sanquin, 2018 – 2022).
• Memorabel research project Dementia back in the heart of the community (co-PI; 622 k€ consortium; ZonMw, 2017 – 2021).
• FWO postdoctoral fellowship Interactive Mining and Evaluation of Pattern Sets (PI; 224 k€; FWO, 2013 – 2016).
• Rubicon grant Exploratory Search for Interesting Patterns in Complex Data (PI; 110 k€; NWO, 2011 – 2013).

Awards

• Journal Track Reviewer Award at ECML PKDD 2020.
• IEEE ICTAI Ramamoorthy Award for best paper at ICTAI 2013,
  for Active Preference Learning for Ranking Patterns.
• Best Student Knowledge Discovery Paper at ECML PKDD 2009,
  for Identifying the Components.
• Student Travel Award (runner-up best student paper) at CIKM 2009,
  for Compressing Tags to Find Interesting Media Groups.

Selected invited talks

• Interpretable Machine Learning with Truly Unordered Rule Sets. Invited talk at Business Analytics Lunch Seminar, University of Amsterdam. 16 March 2026.
• Truly Unordered Rule Sets. Invited talk at Spring Workshop on Mining and Learning (SMiLe 2025), KU Leuven. 6 June 2025.
• Interpretable Machine Learning for Health Care. Invited talk at Fraunhofer AICOS Portugal. 20 March 2025, online.
• Explainable Models for Clinical Data Analysis. Invited talk at 3rd Leiden Drug Development Conference (LDDC), Leiden. 19 September 2024.
• Making Sense of Interpretable Machine Learning. Invitation-only workshop at the Lorentz Center. October 2022, Leiden (the Netherlands).
• Towards human-guided rule learning. Keynote at ICFCA 2021. 2 July 2021, online.
• Digital Twins with Hybrid Models. Invited talk at Digital Twins Afternoon Meetup, Wageningen University & Research. 9 November 2020, online.
• Data mining meets machine learning: interpretable prediction and subgroup discovery. EAISI Data Science lecture at Data Science Center Eindhoven. 5 March 2020, Eindhoven (the Netherlands).
• Subjective Interestingness for Network Analysis. Keynote at Workshop on Computational Intelligence & Its Applications. 15 November 2019, Greater-Noida (India).
• Invited talk at the Scientific Computer Assisted Reporting (SciCAR) conference, Erich Brost Institute. September 2019, Dortmund (Germany).
• Mine, Interact, Learn, Repeat. Invited talk at MPI Informatics and Saarland University. 10 July, Saarbrücken (Germany).
• Data Mining by Compression. Invited talk for study association De Leidsche Flesch. 7 February 2018, Leiden (the Netherlands).
• Data Mining by Compression. Invited talk at KU Leuven. 9 June 2017, Leuven (Belgium).
• Mine, Interact, Learn, Repeat. Invited talk at Aalto University. 4 May 2017, Helsinki (Finland).
• MDL for Pattern Mining Guest lecture for Pattern Mining course at UC Louvain. 27 April 2017, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium).
• Expect the Unexpected - On the Significance of Subgroups. Invited talk at SSDM workshop @ ECML PKDD 2016. 19 September 2016, Riva del Garda (Italy).
• Big Data: Hit or Hype?. Keynote at ECMA Congress 2016. 15 September 2016, Antibes (France).
• Big Data: Hype of Hit?. Invited talk at Verenigingscongres De Nederlandse Associatie (DNA). 3 June 2016, Noordwijkerhout (the Netherlands).
• Big Data: Opportunity or Risk?. Guest lecture for Honours College Social and Behavioural Sciences. 7 March 2016, Leiden (the Netherlands).
• MDL for Pattern Mining. Guest lecture for Advanced Data Mining course at Antwerp University. 1 March 2016, Antwerp (Belgium).
• Information Theoretic Methods in Data Mining. Guest lecture at SIKS course on Foundations of Data Science; Data and Process mining. 14 December 2015, Utrecht (the Netherlands).
• Patterns that Matter. Invited talk at Science meets Business café. 10 December 2015, Leiden (the Netherlands).
• Mine, Interact, Learn, Repeat. Keynote at symposium on Instant data mining and learning preferences for interactive data mining. 19 November 2015, Nancy (France).
• Patterns that Matter. Invited talk at Annual LIACS Business Event 2015. 17 November 2015, Leiden (the Netherlands).

Invited visits

• Nov 2019 – One week visit to the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.
• May 2016 – One week visit to the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (FIOH), Helsinki.
• June 2014 – One week visit to the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University.
• Apr - May 2013 – Two week visit to the Pattern Analysis group of the University of Bristol.
• Oct 2012 – Two week visit to the Discovery Group at the University of Helsinki and Aalto University, affiliated with the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT.
• May 2010 – Two week visit to Yahoo! Research, Barcelona.
• Dec 2003 - Mar 2004 – Four month visit to the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI), ETH Zürich, for master thesis project.
• May - Jun 2002 – Two month visit to the evolutionary robotics lab, EPFL Lausanne.

Visitors

• April 2026 – Dr. Leonardo Pellegrina (University of Padova, Italy).
• September - November 2021 – Antonio López Martínez-Carrasco (University of Murcia, Spain).
• February - March 2019 – Sarang Kapoor (IIT Roorkee, Roorkee, India).
• October 2018 – Dr. Antti Ukkonen (University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland).
• September - November 2018 – Dr. Sepinoud Azimi (Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland).
• March 2018 – Clément Gautrais (Inria Lab, Rennes, France).
• September 2017 – Dr. Sepinoud Azimi (Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland).
• July 2017 – Dr. Dhish Saxena and Sarang Kapoor (IIT Roorkee, Roorkee, India).
• February 2017 – Dr. Antti Ukkonen (Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Helsinki, Finland).

Chairing and organisation

• General chair of IDA 2015, the 14th International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis.
• Program co-chair of IDA 2014, the 13th International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis.
• Workshop and Tutorial co-chair of ECML PKDD 2016, the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery.
• PhD Forum co-chair of ECML PKDD 2027, the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery.
• Demo co-chair of ICDM 2012.
• Track co-chair of the ASCI/IPA/SIKS track of ICT.OPEN 2019.
• Poster chair of IDA 2013.
• Publicity chair of IDA 2017.
• Publicity co-chair of SDM 2017.
• Publicity co-chair of IUI 2015, the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces.
• Advisory co-chair of IDA 2016, IDA 2018, IDA 2020, IDA 2021, IDA 2023, IDA 2024, the International Symposia on Intelligent Data Analysis.
• Co-organiser of the symposium on Fairness and Transparency, towards responsible data science, Leiden University, 5 March 2019.
• Co-organiser of the BNAIC 2007 – 19th Belgian-Dutch Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

• Co-chair of HuMine 2025, the workshop on Human-Centered Data Mining at ECML PKDD 2025.
• Co-chair of IDEA 2017, the workshop on Interactive Data Exploration and Analysis at KDD 2017.
• Co-chair of IDEA 2016, the workshop on Interactive Data Exploration and Analysis at KDD 2016.
• Co-chair of IDEA 2015, the workshop on Interactive Data Exploration and Analysis at KDD 2015.
• Co-organiser of Data Mining: Beyond the Horizon.
• Co-chair of IDEA 2014, the workshop on Interactive Data Exploration and Analysis at KDD 2014.
• Co-chair of IDEA 2013, the workshop on Interactive Data Exploration and Analysis at KDD 2013.
• Co-chair of IID 2012, the workshop on Instant and Interactive Data Mining at ECML PKDD 2012.
• Co-chair of MPS 2010, the Lorentz workshop on Mining Patterns and Subgroups.

• Co-lecturer of the tutorial on Information Theoretic Methods in Data Mining at SDM 2015.
• Co-lecturer of the tutorial on Information Theoretic Methods in Data Mining at ECML PKDD 2014.

• Group leader of the Explanatory Data Analysis group at LIACS (2016 - ).
• Member of the core team of the SAILS research programme (2021 - 2022).
• Project leader of the NWO TTW Perspectief project Automated Model Updating of Digital Twins (2020 - 2026).
• Member of the management team of Leiden University's Data Science Research Programme (2016 - 2021).
• Project manager of the NWO PROMIMOOC and DAMIOSO projects (2015 - 2016).

• General chair of the IDA council (2018 - ).
• Member of the Committee Review Board of the Lorentz-eScience Competition (2020, 2021).
• Chair and founder of LIACSng, an active group of young academic staff members at LIACS (2019 - 2020).
• Member of the LIACS Data Science Computing Lab committee (2016 - 2022).
• Member of the LIACS Institute Council (2015 - 2022; acting chair Dec 2016 - June 2017).
• Member of the IDA advisory board (2014 - ).

• Programme director of the LIACS Master programmes Computer Science and Creative Intelligence & Technology, the Business Studies specialisation, and the Artificial Intelligence & Business minor (Leiden University, 2022 - ).
• Member of the LIACS management team (Leiden University, 2022 - ).
• Chair of the panels for the mid-term reviews of the BSc and MSc programmes Mathematics and Business Analytics at VU Amsterdam (2023).
• Programme manager Master Computer Science (Leiden University, 2019 - 2022).
• Study advisor Master Computer Science (Leiden University, 2016 - 2019).

• Dr. Taylan Turan (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands; 7 July 2026)
• Dr. Koos van der Linden (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands; 10 June 2026)
• Dr. Joscha Cueppers (CISPA Saarbrücken, Germany; 11 September 2025)
• Dr. Bas Kessels (Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands; 6 February 2025)
• Dr. Yiwen Lu (examiner; Monash University, Australia; 10 September 2024)
• Dr. Anna Latour (opposition committee; Leiden University, the Netherlands; 13 September 2022)
• Dr. Andrea Tonon (University of Padua, Italy; January 2022)
• Dr. Francesco Bariatti (L’Université de Rennes 1, France; 23 November 2021)
• Dr. Sanjar Karaev (Saarland University, Germany; 10 July 2019)
• Dr. Ricardo Cachucho (opposition committee; Leiden University, the Netherlands; 10 December 2018)
• Dr. Sergey Paramonov (KU Leuven, Belgium; 29 October 2018)
• Dr. Roel Bertens (Utrecht University, the Netherlands; 17 May 2017)
• Dr. Andreas Henelius (opponent; Aalto University, Finland; 5 May 2017)
• Dr. Thanh Le Van (KU Leuven, Belgium; 11 January 2017)

• NWO – Dutch Research Council (grant proposals)
• FWO – Research Foundation Flanders (grant proposals)
• Cambridge University Press (book proposals)
• SAGE Publishing (book proposals)