Another trip down memory lane. I rediscovered this short text somewhere in a far corner of the internet today It's the manifesto for the Data Drive research group that Sander van Maas, Robin Boast, and I started together in 2013 at the University of Amsterdam. Forgot all about it, but boy, is it. relevant today.

Last year, I was asked to develop a vision for online collaboration for the Planet B project. The challenge: building a community of people that may never be in the same place at the same time. The solution: a mob of bots with an attitude.

Behaviour Driven Development is a practice that helps engineers and their users to align their expectations. In this post, I explain how Public Badges build on this practice by rendering the implicit values behind these expectations explicit.

In 2013, way before social distancing made it cool, Marijn Koolen and I proposed that the University of Amsterdam should take a large part of their teaching online. We saw an opportunity to increase the quality of education. In 2020, I’m surprised that most people still treat online learning as second best.

Supervised and unsupervised learning are two branches of machine learning. But these terms designate much more than a mere technical distinction. This post explains that unsupervised learning promises a new way to think about intelligence in general: Human and otherwise.

Fake news is often treated as a property of information. However on a content level facts and lies are now mostly impossible to distinguish. In this post, I argue that we should bypass this problem by focusing on the agent rather than on the news.

On the internet, lacunas of trust are mostly countered by tightening security measures. This move hardly ever results in the intended result, and almost always weakens the trust relations between digital citizens. With Public Badges, we enable organizations and initiatives to communicate why they are trustworthy to their users.

This is an old blogpost that I wrote in 2013. To me, it marked the beginning of a personal journey that I'm still on today. Over the last 7 years, the way I look at research, learning, and work has completely changed. But in essence, it's all here. In other words, this blogpost is mainly here for nostalgic purposes.