Network Institute
We congratulate Dr. Mengyuan Zhang and Dr. Lianying Zhao on their recent publication. One of VU’s Network institute Research Visits has produced a paper published at the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (presented in Barcelona Spain … Continue reading
Last summer, Dr. Jieying Chen from the Department of Computer Science and Dr. Chendi Wang from the Department of Political Science received funding through the Network Institute Academy Assistants programme to support two research assistants working on the interdisciplinary project … Continue reading
Imagine a handful of companies which own every piece of infrastructure in your city. One company owns every road, every sign, every map. Thats their platform: they decide which streets are visible and where traffic flows. That is the state … Continue reading
Does the use of metaphors improve comprehension of, and shape attitudes toward, quantum technology? We want to congratulate Aletta Meinsma and Gudrun Reijnierse on their recent publication on this question in Metaphor and the Social World. From September till November 2023, … Continue reading
We want to congratulate Jakub Frąc and Alexander Schmatz, our 2024-2025 cohort of Network Institute Academy Assistants, and their supervisors Qiang Li, Guido Van Wingen, and Shujian Yu, on the forthcoming presentation of their project “Adapting HFMCA to Graph Data: Self-Supervised Learning … Continue reading
We are pleased to share that the paper, Before Robots Learn, Students Must: Trade-offs in Educating Future Roboticists, has been accepted for presentation at the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) conference 2026. This research was made possible through funding from the Network … Continue reading
📣 Back with the third post featuring one of the NIAA projects sponsored by the Network Institute. 🔍 Today’s spotlight is on “Visualizing the Future – The Role of Virtual Reality in Promoting Environmental Sustainability”, led by Jagoda Hanuszewicz and Zixuan … Continue reading
📣 Back with another post featuring one of the NIAA projects sponsored by the Network Institute. 🔍 Today’s spotlight is on “Designing and testing peak spreading interventions – using the VU as a living lab”, led by Floor Tazelaar and Lewis … Continue reading
📣 Starting today and for the rest of the week, every day a new post will feature one of the NIAA projects sponsored by the Network Institute. 🔍 Today’s spotlight is on “Mapping Missionaries in the Dutch Colonial Empire 1600-1960”, … Continue reading
In the dynamic world of academic research, literature reviews are the cornerstone for synthesizing knowledge. However, the rapid pace of scientific discovery often renders these reviews obsolete shortly after publication. The concept of “living literature reviews” has emerged as a … Continue reading
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in May 2018, represents a significant step forward in the protection of personal data within the European Union. However, despite its widespread implications, there remains a degree of uncertainty regarding … Continue reading
Quantum science carries risks and benefits to society yet it is hard to communicate these to the public. First then, what is the public’s perception of this topic? The NI’s Gudrun Reijnierse, VU visitor Aletta Meinsma, Sanne Kristensen, Ionica Smeets … Continue reading
How does gender affect cybersecurity decisions? A new study by Winnie Mbaka and Katja Tuma from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam shed some light on this question in their paper “Role of Gender in the Evaluation of Security Decisions”, published in IEEE … Continue reading
Emotion contagion in groups via virtual representatives Emotions are known to be infectious when people meet in person. By interacting with each other, a group tends to become more similar in the emotions they express, resulting in the display of … Continue reading
NI-member and VU academic Lisa Beinborn and Nora Hollenstein published an introductory book to “Cognitive Plausibility in Natural Language Processing”. It is based on the idea that we can learn more about the cognitive plausibility of computational language models by … Continue reading
The open-access scientific publication that formed the basis for the last year’s NI-funded video installation ‘(re)think the role of smart sensors in the digital age‘ has been published now in the FUTURES journal here: The video installation motivated the researchers … Continue reading
Burglary is a common and costly crime which has also been found to be a gateway to violent crimes. On average, the offenders in this study committed 62 burglaries each. Personality is a robust predictor of involvement with crime but … Continue reading
Supervisors Maurits Dijkstra and Peter Bloem with assistants Henriette Capel and Robin Weiler worked on an NI Academy Project (see here) which resulted in a 2022 paper published in Nature Scientific Reports. See: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19608-4 Proteins are the building blocks of … Continue reading