Continuous optimization is never easy: the exact solution is always a luxury demand and the theory of it is not always analytical and elegant.

The Leiden University Centre for Professional Learning has acquired the exclusive license in Europe 2018 from the American Certified Public Manager® Program. This program is carried out in cooperation with partners in Europe. The language of instruction of this program is English.

Are you eager to bring your own questions and curiosity into scientific research? Do the creation of media and use of technology drive your research interests? Could you be a researcher who challenges scientific practice and pushes its boundaries?

Promotor: F. Arbab

A collection of newly written chapters by various specialists from different disciplines (with a background in philosophy) on the subject of free will as it is discussed in their (inter)disciplinary field.

Where does Europe begin and end? How have the European Union and its precursors decided which countries are eligible to join the community and which are not? Few issues are more hotly debated, more important for the course of European integration, or more consequential for individuals in and around…

Chapter by Fabio Cristiano and Emilio Distretti for the volume The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self, edited by Donatella Della Ratta, Geert Lovink, Teresa Numerico, and Peter Sarram for Palgrave Macmillan.

Making predictions about emotional problems or the effects of air pollution: Marjolein Fokkema’s algorithms are getting better at this all the time. She is making her algorithms increasingly flexible, so they can predict not just characteristics at one particular moment, but also how skills, for example,…

Ramesh Ganohariti, PhD student and Ernst Dijxhoorn, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, researched the relation between international relations and sports, with sport and sports events increasingly being used for various diplomatic and political goals.

This project examines the meaning of this historical place, and the way it has been used by the political institutions that have had their seat there.

On Friday 31 March, all students of Leiden University can take part into an international coding contest in Wijnhaven, the brand new building on the The Hague campus. The best player receives a drone, presented to him or her by the Dutch ICT politician of the Year. Register for free.

In the last weekend of April, the tenth edition of the Benelux Mathematics Olympiad took place. The Dutch delegation won a total of 8 medals. The 17-year-old Nils van de Berg even obtained a golden one!

Here you can find an overview of the offered courses provided by the Department of Economics per study program.

There is a growing concern that AI programmes like ChatGPT exacerbate existing biases concerning gender, age, race and sexual orientation. As individuals are increasingly integrating the impressive abilities of AI programmes into their companies, organisations and personal lives, it is useful to take…

Alumni event

Carlotta Rigotti and Dr Eduard Fosch-Villaronga from Leiden University presented the Horizon Europe BIAS project and its preliminary findings on fairness and diversity biases of AI applications in the labour market during the 'Algorithms for Her?' conference.

Many countries and regions face a wide variety of challenges resulting from migration and mobility. Solutions that have been formulated range from policies and regulations for immigration, to education and stimulating social participation, to restructuring the welfare state. These challenges and policies…

In today's volatile market environments, companies must be able to continuously innovate. In this context, innovation does not only refer to the development of new products or business models but often also affects the entire organization, which has to transform its structures, processes, and ways of…

Source: Nature Biotechnology, Volume 2014, Issue June (2014)

Taking the changing landscape of international cyber security and cyber conflict as a point of departure, The Hague Program on International Cyber Security focuses on the various modes of governance that states and other actors can bring into play to deal with and shape the strategic changes and challenges…

The Leiden Certified Public Manager® Program comprises 300 hours of structured learning (blended input, applied learning and joint inquiry) and runs over twelve months and starts in Autumn 2017. Academic and practitioner faculty members organise, coordinate and teach the programme. The Leiden Certified…

A research program that focuses on the development and implementation of cyber norms.

If an algorithm has to learn to understand language, simply having a lot of data doesn’t help much. Like us, a computer has to learn the language in interaction with others. Tessa Verhoef is fascinated by how this interaction works.

The basic program comprises a total of thirteen courses organized by the Research School, that have been purpose-developed for training and support of PhD students and Research MA students who specialize in Medieval Studies (history, art history, and literary history, in particular). The courses have…

Science, Mathematical Institute (MI)

We strive to address the challenge of constructing a modeling language to write software which can take advantage of recent hardware developments (multicore, cloud) without compromising in its abstraction levels.

PhD defence

Errors are everywhere, and mechanical failures are especially common: buckled grain silos and cracked support columns are, justly, seen as an issue to be avoided.

2 joint initiatives began in 2019 which attempt to connect the various efforts around active learning at Leiden University: the active learning network, and the Saltswat project.

This thesis consists of two main parts. The first part (Chapters 2 and 3) deals with a class of Markov process called Quasi-Skipfree (QSF) processes.

Join our Faculty photo contest ‘FSW Memories’. Send your photo + story befóre 25 October 2019.

What is the effectiveness of two school-based skills-training programs in promoting mental health?

The Educational Sciences programme group of the Institute of Education and Child Studies at Leiden University provides courses in the field of student education and the learning and development of children in the school context.

Big data promises to transform public decision-making for the better by making it more responsive to actual needs and policy effects. However, much recent work on big data in public decision-making assumes a rational view of decision-making, which has been much criticized in the public administration…

Did you know that algorithms can help with the prevention of air pollution and ships sinking in the sea? A team of Leiden University researchers have worked together with the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management to look in data-driven inspection of ships. In this interview, Gerrit Jan…

How can computers help design optimal buildings? PhD student Koen van der Blom makes algorithms that take into account all kinds of different architectural requirements, in order to reach the best compromise. And that is quite difficult: 'Algorithms do not automatically understand that a building that…

Every day we make use of devices, services and apps which contain algorithms that could be discriminating. These range from Facebook to self-driving cars, from the Tax Authorities to a rotating door.

Where should you plant ten trees so that as many city-dwellers as possible can enjoy them? If a smart algorithm knows how people move through the city and where there are already trees, it can calculate the optimal solution. Data scientist Mitra Baratchi makes this possible. Her students are now using…

PhD student Sung-Shik Jongmans of Leiden University and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica investigated a new programming method to simplify this. On 3 March 2016, he graduated with the exceptional predicate 'cum laude' on his dissertation 'Automata-Theoretic Protocol Programming'. His results are interesting…

The main topic of this PhD thesis is the Arakelov ray class group of a number field, an algebraic object that contains both the ideal class group structure and the unit group structure.

The program group Learning and Behavior Problems in Education is located in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of Leiden University near Central Station.

Anne Meeussen is the winner of the Fysica 2020 Young Speakers' Contest. She was elected by the online attendants after delivering a talk about metamaterials.

Dave R. Stikkolorum, Michel R.V. Chaudron, Oswald de Bruin won the Best Paper Award of the Model Gamification Contest at the ACM/IEEE Models 2012 Conference for their paper: The Art Of Software Design, a Video Game for Learning Design Principles.

At the annual conference FYSICA of the Netherlands’ Physical Society (NNV), Leiden postdoc Scott Waitukaitis has won the Young Speakers Contest.

Assistant Professor Vedran Dunjko and his team received a gift from Google to support their quantum research. The research focuses on whether quantum computers can provide new ways of understanding the mysteries of high-energy physics.

This thesis reports on the influence of induction programs on beginning teachers’ well-being and professional development, and the essential characteristics of an induction program. These topics were explored by means of an interview study and large scale survey study.

This dissertation reports on the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of science teachers during a professional development program. This research intended to help us understand why and how teachers make their classroom decisions as they teach science.