Curriculum vitae

Matthijs is full professor of Explainable Machine Learning at LIACS, the computer science and AI institute of Leiden University. He is programme director of LIACS' Master programmes, a member of the LIACS management team, and group leader of the Explanatory Data Analysis group.

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 (2020-2026), (tenure track) assistant professor (2017-2020), and senior researcher (2015-2017) at Leiden University. 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 from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (5.7 M€, consortium, NWO, 2020 – 2025).
• TOP grant (module 2) from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (∼249 k€, NWO, 2019 – 2023).
• Sanquin PPO research grant (∼234 k€, Sanquin, 2018 – 2022).
• Memorabel research project from the The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (622 k€, consortium, ZonMW, 2017 – 2021).
• FWO postdoctoral fellowship from the Flanders Organisation for Scientific Research (224 k€, FWO, 2013 – 2016).
• Rubicon grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (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.
• 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.
• Digital Twins with Hybrid Models. Invited talk at Digital Twins Afternoon Meetup, Wageningen University & Research. 9 November 2020, online.
• Towards human-guided rule learning. Keynote at ICFCA 2020. 2 July, Strasbourg, France.
• 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).
• 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 of the University of Helsinki and 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.

• General chair of the IDA council (2018 - ).
• 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 and member of the LIACS management team (Leiden University, 2022 - ).
• Programme manager Master Computer Science (Leiden University, 2019 - 2022).
• Study advisor Master Computer Science (Leiden University, 2016 - 2019).

• Koos van der Linden (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands; 10 June 2026)
• Dr. Joscha Cueppers (CISPA Saarbrucken, Germany; 11 September 2025)
• Dr. Bas Kessels (Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands; 6 February 2025)
• Dr. Yiwen Lu (Monash University, Australia; 10 September 2024)
• Dr. Anna Latour (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 (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)