CV

Personal Details

Dr. T.A.L. van Erven

Positions and Studies

2012 – present Postdoc at Université Paris-Sud, France with Pascal Massart
2011 – 2012 Postdoc at VU University with Aad van der Vaart
2010 – 2011 Postdoc at CWI with Peter Grünwald
2006 – 2010 PhD student at CWI under supervision of Peter Grünwald
2005 Trainee at CWI
2000 – 2006 Studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam. Obtained both the master’s degree and the kandidaats degree cum laude (with honors). Also completed the first year of Computer Science courses.

In my PhD thesis I studied topics related to the role of information theory in statistics, with an emphasis on the minimum description length (MDL) principle. It includes chapters on Bayesian model selection and online learning, which are closely related to MDL.

Grants and Awards

2011 Awarded a Rubicon grant by the Dutch Science Foundation to do a two-year postdoc in Paris with Pascal Massart.
2009 A preprint of the paper Catching up faster by switching sooner won second prize in the student paper competition of the Risk Analysis Section of the American Statistical Association.

Academic Experience

2009 Two-month visit to prof. Bob Williamson at NICTA, Canberra, Australia.
2008 Co-organizer of the workshop Recent Breakthroughs in MDL Learning (ICML/UAI/COLT, Helsinki, Finland)
2007 Taught the course machine learning at the VU University

Other Activities

2004 Board member of student organization VIA
2003 – 2006 Contributor to the VIA magazine
2003 – 2005 Teaching assistant at the University of Amsterdam
2003 Assistant organiser of the Belgian-Dutch AI Symposium (BNAIS) 2003
2003 Contributions to various Open Source programming projects
2002 – 2003 Student mentor at the University of Amsterdam
1999 – 2004 Production of supporting software for the best-index, an international psychological test to assess social risk of psychiatric patients