News

UM’s Mark Levels set up TECHNEQUALITY, a consortium of leading scholars around Europe. Their mission: to find out how AI and robotisation will affect the labour market and what policies are best suited to cushioning the blow – and hopefully tide me over to retirement.

Women in Data Science (WiDS) Datathon is a data-focused hackathon which invites students and faculty members from all backgrounds as well as practitioners from industry and government to participate in a global challenge.

It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Geert Hofstede, professor emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management. Geert reached the blessed age of 91. This world-renowned cultural scholar is survived by his wife Maaike, his four children, ten grandchildren and five greatgrandchildren. According to his oldest son Gert Jan, with whom Geert co-authored major work and who will go on carry the torch, his father was ‘ready to go’.

Cyrus Mody, historian of science and technology at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS), has received an NWO Vici grant of €1,500,000. 

PhD-research shows the positive effects on safety and financial benefits of risk-based obstetrics.

Can you reduce the room temperature of your home and still feel comfortable? Can you keep up the habit of doing fewer loads of laundry? Yes and yes, according to the findings of the ENERGISE project, which challenged 300 households in eight countries to reduce their energy consumption.

Many of us interact every day with Siri, Apple's voice-activated digital personal assistant. The machines are getting smarter, but experts are divided as to when we'll move from basic AI to the scarey stuff of science fiction, if at all. Almost 50% of American jobs are under threat over the next 15 years, and health care will probably get more expensive as AI increasingly gets involved in keeping us alive. But besides the benefits, what are the risks?

On January 1, 2020, Dr. Jan van den Berg was appointed professor by special appointment of Plant Envirogenetics at the UM Faculty of Science & Engineering. It concerns an appointment of 0.2 FTE for five years.

Annemie Schols, Professor of Nutrition and Metabolism in Chronic Diseases, has been appointed as the new dean of the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences (FHML). She will begin her first four-year appointment on 1 June 2020.

UM’s Katleen Gabriels is a moral philosopher, specialised in computer ethics. She looks into how morality and computer technologies influence each other. Her new book Rules for Robots. Ethics and Artificial Intelligence asks some questions that will need to be answered very soon.