About me

I am an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence for Business at the University of Amsterdam Business School and a guest researcher at the Informatics Institute of the UvA. I conduct research on multimedia information retrieval, i.e., facilitating access to large multimedia collections and gaining insight from them, by jointly analyzing visual content and the heterogeneous information associated with it, ranging from text and automatically generated metadata to information about users and their social network. With regard to the application domains, my research focuses on urban computing, business, and security applications.

I am a scientific director of Multimedia Information Retrieval for Business, an inter-faculty lab between the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Economics and Business and the Informatics Institute of the Faculty of Science, which is a part of broader UvA's initiative focusing on AI Technology for People. In addition, I am a Co-Principal Investigator in UvA Data Science Centre HAVA-Lab focusing on pioneering research in Human-Aligned Video AI.

Over the years I have taken various organizational and community service roles, such as most recently General Chair of MMM'24, Technical Program Chair of ACM Multimedia 2025, Technical Program Chair of MMM'26 and General Chair of ACM ICMR'26.

Interests: multimedia, computer vision, information retrieval, machine learning

News

• 06-02-2026: Our paper titled Looking Beyond the Obvious: A Survey on Abstract Concept Recognition for Video Understanding with Gowreesh Mago has been accepted for publication in International Journal of Computer Vision.
• 31-01-2026: We successfully organized 32nd International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM'26) in Prague, for which I was serving as a Technical Program Chair.
• 13-01-2026: Our paper titled "VL-KGE: Vision-Language Models Meet Knowledge Graph Embeddings" with Thanos Efthymiou has been accepted to The ACM Web Conference 2026.
• 15-12-2025: Ujjwal Sharma successfully defended his PhD thesis titled Analyzing Abstract Dimensions in Online Social Multimedia.
• 07-11-2025: Our paper titled Being Ranked in a Material World: The visual originality of an artwork and its effects on the artist's canonization with Thanos Efthymiou has been published in Organization Studies.
• 31-10-2025: We successfully organized 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM Multimedia 2025) in Dublin, for which I was serving as a Technical Program Chair.
• 29-10-2025: Shuai Wang presented our paper titled ArtRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Structured Context for Visual Art Understanding at the 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM Multimedia 2025) in Dublin.
• 14-10-2025: Our paper titled Interactive Image Retrieval Meets Query Rewriting with Large Language and Vision Language Models with Hongyi Zhu has been published in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications.
• 24-09-2025: Jieyi Li successfully defended his PhD thesis titled Analyzing the Impact of High-Performance Computing on Healthcare from Technological, Economic, and Business Perspectives.
• 01-09-2025: Our collaboration with the City of Amsterdam on Artificial Intelligence for improving city livability was prominently featured during the opening of academic year, and during the 750 years of Amsterdam festivities as an exemplary UvA research with high societal impact.
• 03-07-2025: At ACM ICMR 2025 in Chicago we announced that the 16th ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ACM ICMR'26), for which I am serving as a General Chair, will be held in Amsterdam 16-19 June 2026.
• 30-04-2025: Yunming Hui presented our paper titled Domain-Informed Negative Sampling Strategies for Dynamic Graph Embedding in Meme Stock-Related Social Networks at The ACM Web Conference 2025 in Sydney.
• 01-01-2025: Our paper titled Adaptive Neural Message Passing for Inductive Learning on Hypergraphs with Devanshu Arya has been published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

Postdoc

• Ujjwal Sharma: Artificial Intelligence systems for analyzing abstract themes in large-scale multimodal data

PhD students

• Marleen de Jonge: Artificial Intelligence for sustainable investment and insurance
• Gowreesh Mago: Human-aligned video-AI for responsible business
• Yunming Hui: Network statistics and machine learning
• Hongyi Zhu: Multimodal conversational search for business
• Shuai Wang: Multimodal foundation models for cultural industries and science
• Thanos Efthymiou: Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Industries: Tipping points in categorization and canonization in the art market
• Ujjwal Sharma: Artificial Intelligence and Marketing: Analyzing abstract dimensions in online social multimedia (completed his PhD thesis in 2025)
• Jieyi Li: Measuring the impact of high performance computing in healthcare (completed his PhD thesis in 2025)
• Maarten Sukel: Machine learning with geo, temporal, textual, and visual data for real world applications (completed his PhD thesis in 2024)
• Devanshu Arya: Multimodal deep learning on hypergraphs (completed his PhD thesis in 2022)
• Jan Zahálka: The Machine in Multimedia Analytics (completed his PhD thesis in 2017)