The SSH Sector Plans are a national initiative in which Dutch universities collaborate to strengthen research and education in the social sciences and humanities.

This website showcases Leiden University’s contribution to the SSH Sector Plans.

At LIACS, we recognize the growing need for advanced technical support in research projects and lab education. Increasing student numbers, more and more advanced hardware and infrastructure, new demands around data safety and management, and the complexity of core computer science courses necessitate…

The goal of the LIACS Media Lab (LML) at Leiden University is to conduct state-of-the-art research in the areas of deep learning, artificial intelligence and computer vision.

The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) of Leiden University proudly establishes the Blaise Pascal chair. The chair applies for one year and is meant to strengthen the cooperation of the Leiden computer science research with foreign institutes.

Research on Inclusiveness and Diversity at the Faculty of Science at Leiden University

Infographic find out who to contact for questions about education LIACS students education Office contacts

The new SSH labs will offer great opportunities for FSW and FGW staff engaged in experimental research. The labs will be a place of inspiration, not only because of the state-of-the-art equipment, but also as a result of the increased interaction with colleagues in other disciplines.

On the second floor of the Sylvius Laboratory, new labs are being built for researchers of the Faculties of Social and Behavioural Sciences and Humanities. After a successful tender construction has recently started.

Prestigieus grant awarded to SAILS researchers!

The PDI-SSH grant will be used by Meuwese to create a web portal and collection of tools and resources, named ‘WetSuite’, that will help researchers apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to legal textual data from public bodies.

LIACS receives grant from Intel for research and development of innovative technology to program multi-processors.

On June 2nd Roy de Winter has won the G. Rosenberg Research Award from the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS). De Winter was presented with the award during the celebration of the LIACS' 25th anniversary. The new award is intended for promising PhD students at LIACS.

By making two final network connections and entering a command, Martijn Ridderbos (Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board) , Geert de Snoo (Dean of the Faculty of Science) and Bart Hoogervorst (Head of Department Operations ICT Shared Service Centre) ceremonially booted up the university’s latest supercomputer,…

An impact factor of 3.2 in the Web of Science journal index. And in the first 10% of Elsevier's Scopus index. The International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval (IJMIR), founded at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), has become one of the most important multimedia j…

Matthijs van Leeuwen and Frank Takes have been appointed directors of education at LIACS as of 1 September. They will succeed Marcello Bonsangue, who has held the position since 2016. Van Leeuwen and Takes have been appointed for a period of four years.

During this year's Dutch Film Festival (NFF), which took place from 27 September to 5 October in Utrecht, a new Artificial Intelligence-driven Virtual Reality project was pitched for BoostNL. This project, The Great Orator, was conceived by the Dutch interactive illustrator Daniel Ernst and realized…

LIACS scientist, Dr. Michael S. Lew, along with his students now has the most cited article in the top tier neural network journal Neurocomputing, the second highest Google Scholar impact over all neural network journals worldwide.

With the new SSH labs and their organisation, the lab coordinators will also fulfill a new role. An interfaculty workgroup -consisting of staff from Psychology, Pedagogical Sciences, Humanities and SOLO - is currently discussing the new role of the lab coordinators, and how the lab coordinators can…

On December 4th an agreement was signed between the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). Cor Veenman (NFI) will perform research in the field of Forensic Big Data Science at LIACS.

The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) received a grant award from NWO for a joint proposal with Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI, Amsterdam), Tata Steel (IJmuiden), BMW (Munich), and database company MonetDB. Within the NWO Data Science program ‘challenging big data‘, LIACS is…

Marcello Bonsangue will be the new Scientific Director of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) from January 2024. Bonsangue has been appointed for four years. He succeeds Aske Plaat, who led the institute for eight years.

The 14th International Global Optimization Workshop (LeGO 2018) was hosted by Leiden University in September.

Former PhD student of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) Bart Thomee has received this year’s Rising Star Award from the Multimedia group of ACM, the worldwide computer science association. Today, Thomee is a successful researcher at Yahoo Labs.

The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) is a proud member of the NExt ApplicationS of Quantum Computing (NEASQC) consortium, which recently received an ERC H2020 grant to stimulate the state-of-the-art in industrial quantum computing. LIACS contributes research and development of new…

Daily-adapted radiotherapy can help to more precisely target radiation dose to tumors compared to the current clinical practice, while avoiding radiosensitive organs-at-risk in the surrounding area. A main obstacle however is that new treatment plans need to be created every day, which is a manual and…

This week Dutch newspapers NRC and de Volkskrant consulted scientists from the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) about the impact of the Cambridge Analytica storm. This company gained insight into the data of 50 million Facebook users.

Since January 2019, The Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science is part of the RISE_SMA project. In this European project 6 universities, in collaboration with companies, government authorities and NGOs, will join forces to get more insight in social media data during crisis situations. The kick-off…

Twelve Chinese PhD candidates in the Netherlands who are funded by the China Scholarship Council met with Leiden staff on 26 April 2012 to exchange experiences. Ten days earlier Leiden had welcomed a delegation from Peking University.

There was a lot of interest. In front of nearly a hundred researchers, supporting colleagues and Martijn Ridderbos, the Vice-Chairman of the Executive Board, Lotte van Dillen, Research Director of Psychology and Saskia Goedhard, Director of Humanities Operations jointly opened the new lab with a classic…

In support of the research and education, the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) has a Research and Education laboratory at its disposal. Within this environment, we can offer machines that go beyond normal office automisation and production.

Winning an award at the start of your studies? No problem! Lieke Vertegaal is 20 years old and a first-year Computer Science student at Leiden University. On November 29, 2021, the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KHMW) awarded her a Young Talent incentive award.

Finding solutions for economically and socially relevant problems in digital data security. That is what Nele Mentens, Professor of Applied Cryptography & Data Security at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), wants to achieve. On 1 June she was appointed to contribute to the institute…

An increasing number of researchers in the social sciences, humanities, and arts (SSH+A) are working with non-traditional research outputs (NTROs), such as films, performances, and sound recordings. However, these forms of research often receive little recognition within the digital scholarly infrastructure,…

In September 2025, Leiden University submitted its self-evaluation for the mid-term review of the Social and Behavioural Sciences Sector Plan. This self-evaluation provides an overview of the progress made within Leiden since the start of the SSH Sector Plans and reflects on how FSW and FGGA contribute…

He came to the Netherlands for three months and never left. Marcello Bonsangue is the new scientific director of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) since January this year. 'I think it is important to be there for the people of our institute. My door is always open.'

An overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2020, as well as special appointments at Leiden University and other institutions.

On 8 November 2021 YAL organized the successful symposium Interdisciplinary Research: Challenges and Opportunities.

This page brings together the Assistant Professors appointed through the SSH Sector Plans at Leiden University. Each researcher plays a key role in strengthening our social sciences community — advancing new research lines, innovative teaching, and collaboration across faculties.

Leiden University’s contribution to the national SSH Sector Plan is built on a layered and interconnected structure. The Sector Plan themes define shared national priorities; the university’s profile themes embed these priorities within a broader interdisciplinary strategy; and the five FSW Core Themes…

General contact information

LIACS aims at being a diverse and inclusive research institute. To reach this goal, two instances are working on addressing diversity related issues.

The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) offers bachelor and master level education in computer science at Leiden University. We are known for our scientifically based education and for our open atmosphere.

The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) is a centre of excellence for multidisciplinary research and education in computer science and artificial intelligence (AI).

Helping cancer patients with treatment choices.

Within the broader scope of the interdisciplinary programme 'Social Resilience and Security', we seek to provide a broad and deep understanding of the dimensions and etiology of transgressive behaviours, the effects of interventions, and resilience against such behaviours.

This interdisciplinary study focuses on (trans)national ethnic and popular networks, combining historical-ethnographic and computational methods to understand the ‘workings’ of networked conflict interfering in the increasingly violent conflict in the Sahel (Africa) and beyond. The project focuses on…