Kurt Driessens (K.)
Dr. ir. Kurt Driessens is an Associate Professor in the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences at Maastricht University’s Faculty of Science and Engineering. His primary research interests encompass machine learning, reinforcement learning, relational/logical learning, transfer learning, and data representation.
Expertises
His research encompasses reinforcement learning, relational/logical learning, transfer learning, and data representation. He has a particular interest in the automatic discovery of data representations and the relationships between datasets.
Throughout his career, Dr. Driessens has contributed to various areas within machine learning, including:
• Reinforcement Learning: Focusing on representational issues and he was involved with the seminal work on relational reinforcement learning.
• Relational Learning: Exploring the use of a number of relational regression techniques in the context of relational reinforcement learning.
• Transfer Learning: Applied in domains ranging from the main focus on reinforcement learning to classification and applications in the medical field.
Recently, his work has shifted to the exploitation of latent representation discovered by deep learning methods.
Career history
Dr. Driessens earned his degree in Engineering with a major in Computer Science from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) in 1997, followed by a Ph.D. in Applied Sciences from the same institution in 2004. Throughout his career, he has held various academic positions, including visiting lecturer at the University of Zambia, visiting researcher at the Institut Jozef Stefan in Slovenia, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, and post-doctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO).
Since joining Maastricht University in 2011, Dr. Driessens has contributed significantly to both research and education. He served as Director of Studies for the Bachelor in Knowledge Engineering, the Master in Artificial Intelligence, and the Master in Operations Research between 2014 and 2016, overseeing structural changes and the redesign of the Operations Research program into a Data Science Master. He was also a core team member in developing the Bachelor in Computer Science, which commenced in 2023. Currently, he coordinates the KE@Work honours program and has initiated a similar program called CS@Work for the Computer Science bachelor.