Katrien Beuls received her PhD in Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in November 2013 under the supervision of Prof. em. Luc Steels. Within the VUB AI Lab, she is currently leading a research team on Evolutionary & Hybrid AI (EHAI – https://ehai.ai.vub.ac.be). The primary objective of her long-term research program is to gain a deep and precise understanding of the computational mechanisms underlying the emergence, processing and learning of human-like communication systems.
The EHAI team holds extensive and unique expertise in the domains of constructional language processing and agent-based models of emergent communication. Beuls is among the main developers of the Fluid Construction Grammar system (FCG – https://www.fcg-net.org), the most advanced computational framework for implementing construction grammars. She has authored scientific papers on many aspects of computational construction grammar and its applications, including how flexible construction application can be achieved (Van Eecke & Beuls 2017), how constructions can freely combine (Van Eecke & Beuls, 2018), and how computational construction grammar can be used for enhancing the performance and explainability of language technology applications such as visual question answering tasks (Nevens, Van Eecke & Beuls, 2019). Currently, she is in the process of writing an introductory textbook on computational construction grammar, to be published by Routledge in August 2020. Moreover, Beuls is currently among the main developers of the Babel system, an all-in-one toolkit for conducting multi-agent experiments on emergent communication (https://www.emergent-languages.org). She has conducted important experiments on the emergence and evolution of grammatical structures, including agreement markers (Beuls & Steels, 2013), and syntactic categories and patterns (Steels, Van Eecke & Beuls, 2018).
ArTificial Language uNdersTanding In robotS (ATLANTIS)
Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces (ODYCCEUS)
ESSENCE – Evolution of Shared SEmaNtics in Computational Environments
Digging for the Roots of Understanding (DRUST)
Artificial Language Evolution on Autonomous Robots (ALEAR)
Language Games voor het Taalonderwijs
Practice and peRformance Analysis Inspiring Social Education (PRAISE)
(FINISHED 2015) A Cognitive and Computational Investigation of Combinatorial Speech
Artificial Intelligence Programming Paradigms
Natural Language Processing