Who am I?

I am Ruud van Bakel, an aspiring AI researcher from the Netherlands. As of 2023 I am part of the Learning and Reasoning group at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. I like to spend my free time going to the gym and hanging out with my friends.

Education

I started my journey into artificial intelligence with the "Lifestyle Informatics" Bachelor's program at the Vrije Universiteit in 2017. The program focussed on human-centered AI and got renamed to the "Artificial Intelligence" bachelor's program in 2018.

Afterwards, in 2020, I followed the Master's program in artificial intelligence at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. This two-year program allowed me to deepen my knowledge of artificial intelligence and it got me more familiar with the technical side of AI.

As of January 2023, I am a PhD student in the Learning and Reasoning group at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. My research focusses on using machine learning on massive graphs (e.g. graphs with billions of nodes and edges).

Theses

The topic of my Bachelor's thesis was finding an alternative approach to graph embeddings for approximate query answering. This alternative approach, called "Box Embeddings", focussess on embedding objects in the latent space not as points (i.e. using a vector), but as axis-aligned hyperrectangles (using two vectors).

My Master's thesis was centered around Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) for image data. In this work I also showed that these INR representations can effectively be used to train an autoencoder on.

Publications

• “Approximate Knowledge Graph Query Answering: From Ranking to Binary Classification” in Graph Structures for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, LNCS, volume 12640