Research

Research Groups

NLPnorth: Currently I am the Head of our Natural Language Processing (NLP) group at ITU. Here I research with my colleagues Rob van der Goot, Christian Hardmeier, Anna Rogers, and Ratish Puduppully, as well as our PostDocs and PhD students, and interconnect my research on modelling cognition in the brain, such as language processing, with research on fundamental and applied problems for human-centred and computational understanding of NLP, including reasoning and causality, multi-linguality, multi-domain, and multi-user NLP frameworks, as well as explainable, reliable, and robust LLMs.
 

 

brAIn lab: Our lab, which I co-Head with Paolo Burelli, is an umbrella for research projects between understanding the brain through AI (i.e. new perspectives on informative biosignals) and pioneering brain- & cognition-inspired AI (i.e. human cognition as inductive bias). The brAIn lab provides SOTA neuro-imaging (EEG) and behaviour-measuring (motion and eye tracking) facilities and hosts related study and supervision projects on all academic levels. As research is a team effort, the lab is tightly linked with my collaborators as well as the NLPnorth and the Creative AI groups at ITU.
 

For interested researchers, there might be open positions, and for students there is a list of topic suggestions.

PhD Supervision

• Alessandro Ariis, with main supervisor Oliver Krancher & Novo Nordisk, AI Automation in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Processes, ITU, Denmark
• Bertram Højer, with co-supervisor Anna Rogers, Seemingly Intelligent Representation Learning & Large Language Models, ITU, Denmark
• Finn Rietz, with main supervisor Johannes A. Stork, Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning, Örebro University, Sweden

Grants

My research is and was funded with grants by: Pioneer Centre for AI & ITU (Denmark), JSPS Kakenhi International Research B (Japan), JST AIP & IRCN (Japan), DAAD International Fellow (Germany), DFG Transregio SFB/TRR 169 (Germany).

Key Collaborations

• Paolo Burelli, Computational User Models & Applied Machine Learning, ITU, Denmark
• Anna Rogers, Understanding Large Language Models, ITU, Denmark
• Tatsuya Daikoku, Computational Neuroscience & Statistical Learning, University of Tokyo, Japan
• Christoph Korn, Decision Neuroscience & Computational Modelling, Heidelberg University, Germany
• Jes Frellsen, Statistical Machine Learning & Bayesian Modelling, DTU Copenhagen, Denmark
• Barbara Plank, Natural Language Processing & Low-ressource Learning, LMU Munich, Germany
• Veronika Cheplygina, Machine Learning & Meta Learning, ITU, Denmark
• Monica Barbir, Developmental Psychology & Language Acquisition, CNRS & Aix Marseille Université, France
• Chien-Te Wu, Cognitive Neuroscience & Consciousness, IRCN/Uni of Tokyo, Japan

Completed Post-graduate Supervision

PhD Thesis (3)

• Laurits Dixen 2026, with main supervisor Paolo Burelli, Modelling Temporal Dynamics of Neural Responses, ITU, Denmark
• Mahya Mohammadi Kashani 2025 (co-supervision with Andrzej Wąsowski), Statistical Assessment of Plans via Probabilistic Optimization of Reliability, ITU, Denmark
• Tobias Hinz 2021 (co-supervision with Stefan Wermter), Disentanglement, Compositionality, Specification: Representation Learning with Generative Adversarial Networks, Universität Hamburg, Germany
• Tayfun Alpay 2021 (co-supervision with Stefan Wermter) Periodicity, Surprisal, Attention: Skip Conditions for Recurrent Neural Networks, Universität Hamburg, Germany