News

INLG 2026 paper published. The long paper with Dr. Anastasia Giachanou appears in the proceedings of the 19th International Natural Language Generation Conference (pages 718–730) under its final title, “Reasoning–Answer Entailment Under GRPO and DPO Fine-Tuning”. About the paper

Invited talk at the HAI SIG Day, Utrecht University. Gave the talk “From Explainable NLP to Human-Centered AI: Connecting research with practice” in the NLP@U session of the SIG Day of Utrecht University’s Human-centered AI focus area on 2 October 2026.

First solo-author paper accepted at a NeurIPS 2026 workshop. “trajectory-judge: What Outcome-Only LLM Judges Miss on Agent Trajectories” was accepted at the NeurIPS 2026 workshop “Who Verifies the Agents?”. Paper · Code

PhD defended at Utrecht University. Defended the thesis “Let Me Explain! Explainable NLP for Understanding Large Language Models” on 9 September 2026 in the Academiegebouw, Utrecht. About the thesis

Long paper accepted at INLG 2026. My paper “Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness Under GRPO and DPO Fine-Tuning”, with Dr. Anastasia Giachanou, was accepted at the 19th International Natural Language Generation Conference in Utrecht, 19–21 October 2026. INLG 2026

R&D Specialist at AcademicTransfer. Took on the R&D Specialist role alongside the senior AI position, leading the company’s 2026 WBSO programme. Both projects were approved for March to December 2026.

Promoted to Senior AI & Data Science Expert. Promoted at AcademicTransfer, leading AI strategy and advanced data science initiatives for academic recruitment solutions.

Secured €5K ADS Grant for CV Priority Sorter. Awarded an Applied Data Science Grant (€5,000) for the project “Optimizing the CV Priority Sorter for Fair and Efficient Prioritization of Academic CVs”, in collaboration with Dr. Robert A. Bagheri, Dr. Georg Krempl, and Jeroen Sparla.

IOPS Best Oral Presentation Award. Received the Best Oral Presentation Award at the IOPS Winter Conference 2025 for research on cultural moral alignment in LLMs. Event details

Paper accepted at the LUHME Workshop, ECAI 2025. Paper accepted at the 2nd LUHME Workshop at ECAI 2025 on cross-cultural morality understanding with large language models.

Received €9K CUCo Spark Grant. Awarded a Centre for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo) Spark Grant (€9,000) for “ReDOSE: Towards a more Circular Pharmaceutical Industry using AI”, an interdisciplinary collaboration across WUR, TU/e, and UMCU.

Secured €5K ADS Grant for LLM research. Awarded an Applied Data Science Grant (€5,000) for the project “Rule Extraction from Human Evaluation Using LLMs and Reinforcement Learning”, in collaboration with Dr. Anastasia Giachanou and Dr. Shihan Wang.

Paper accepted at ACL 2025 (GeBNLP Workshop). Paper accepted on LLM reliability assessment and annotation reliability.

Selected for LERU Doctoral Summer School 2025. Selected as the representative of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Utrecht University, for the LERU Doctoral Summer School on Artificial Intelligence in Copenhagen.

Awarded €14.4K Enfield Grant. Received a European Lighthouse to Manifest Trustworthy and Green AI (Enfield) grant for research on “User Perspectives on Explainable AI”.

Co-founded NLP@U Young Scholar Network. As a core member, co-founded the NLP@U Young Scholar Network, a collaborative community for PhD students, postdocs, and early-career researchers in Natural Language Processing at Utrecht University and UMC Utrecht.

Communications Chair at BNAIC/BeNeLearn 2024. Served as Communications Chair for the Joint International Scientific Conferences on AI and Machine Learning at Utrecht University.

€7,500 Applied Data Science grant for “Assessing Reliability of Annotations in the Context of Model Predictions and Explanations”, with Dr. Pablo Mosteiro Romero, Dr. Anastasia Giachanou, and Prof. Dr. Massimo Poesio.