The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other being the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The literal translation of the Dutch name Vrije Universiteit is "Free University". "Free" refers to independence of the university from both the State and the Dutch Reformed Church. Both within and outside the university, the institution is commonly referred to as "the VU". Although founded as a private institution, the VU has received government funding on a parity basis with public universities since 1970. The university is located on a compact urban campus in the southern Buitenveldert neighbourhood of Amsterdam and adjacent to the modern Zuidas business district.
The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is a Dutch and English-speaking research university located in Brussels, Belgium. It has four campuses: Brussels Humanities, Science and Engineering Campus, Brussels Health Campus, Brussels Technology Campus and Brussels Photonics Campus.
The Free University of Brussels was a university in Brussels, Belgium. Founded in 1834 on the principle of "free inquiry", its founders envisaged the institution as a free-thinker reaction to the traditional dominance of Catholicism in Belgian education. The institution was avowedly secular and particularly associated with Liberal political movements during the era of pillarisation. The Free University was one of Belgium's major universities, together with the Catholic University of Leuven and the state universities of Liège and Ghent.
The Université libre de Bruxelles is a French-speaking research university in Brussels, Belgium. ULB is one of the two institutions tracing their origins to the Free University of Brussels, founded in 1834 by the lawyer and liberal politician Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen.
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgian physicist and mathematician. She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression.
Jean Paul Van Bendegem is a mathematician, a philosopher of science, and a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels.
Leo Apostel was a Belgian philosopher and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University. Apostel was an advocate of interdisciplinary research and the bridging of the gap between exact science and humanities.
VIB is a research institute located in Flanders, Belgium. It was founded by the Flemish government in 1995, and became a full-fledged institute on 1 January 1996. The main objective of VIB is to strengthen the excellence of Flemish life sciences research and to turn the results into new economic growth. VIB spends almost 80% of its budget on research activities, while almost 12% is spent on technology transfer activities and stimulating the creation of new businesses, in addition VIB spends approximately 2% on socio-economic activities. VIB is member of EU-LIFE, an alliance of leading life sciences research centres in Europe.
Lodewijk Jules Arthur Wyns is a Belgian former athlete and molecular biologist and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Roger Michael Needham was a British computer scientist.
Fred Van Oystaeyen, also Freddy van Oystaeyen, is a mathematician and emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Antwerp. He has pioneered work on noncommutative geometry, in particular noncommutative algebraic geometry.
Katherine "Kathy" Anne Yelick, an American computer scientist, is the vice chancellor for research and the Robert S. Pepper Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she was Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences from 2010–2019.
Evert Jan Baerends is a Dutch theoretical chemist. He is an emeritus professor of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Baerends is known for his development and application of electronic structure calculations, which over time led to the development of the Amsterdam Density Functional. He worked extensively on density functional theory.
Yael Tauman Kalai is a cryptographer and theoretical computer scientist who works as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and as an adjunct professor at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Caroline Pauwels was a Belgian communication studies scholar and rector of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, serving from September 2016 to February 2022.
Sonja Smets is a Belgian and Dutch logician and epistemologist known for her work in belief revision and quantum logic. She is Professor of Logic and Epistemology at the University of Amsterdam, where she was the director of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (2016-2021) and is affiliated with both the Faculty of Science and the Department of Philosophy. She also holds a visiting professor position at the University of Bergen in Norway.
Kerstin Dautenhahn is a German computer scientist specializing in social robotics and human–robot interaction. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, where she holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics and directs the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory.
Mirjam Ernestus is professor of psycholinguistics and scientific director of the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Catholijn M. Jonker is a Dutch computer scientist whose research in artificial intelligence has included studies of computational trust and automated negotiation in multi-agent systems and human-agent teams, and the use of mathematical logic to formalize concepts of consciousness and emotion. She is a professor at the Delft University of Technology and Leiden University.
Ann Nowé is a Belgian computer scientist whose research topics in artificial intelligence have included reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, artificial life, and microarray analysis techniques. She is a professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, affiliated both with the Computer Science Department in the Faculty of Sciences and the Computer Science group of the Faculty of Engineering. She heads the university's artificial intelligence laboratory.
