Jilles Vreeken is tenured faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, honorary professor at Saarland University, and fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). He obtained his Ph.D. in 2009 from Utrecht University, was a post-doctoral researcher at Antwerp University until 2013, and both independent research group leader (W2) at Saarland University and senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics until 2018. His research focuses on developing well-founded theory and efficient methods that give clear and actionable insight into large, complex data and models. In more general terms, he likes data mining, machine learning, and causal inference.
Slightly Longer Bio
Jilles Vreeken is tenured faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, where he leads the Exploratory Data Analysis group. In addition, he is Honorary Professor of Computer Science at Saarland University, Fellow of the ELLIS Society, and Faculty of the ELLIS Unit Saarbrücken.
His research interests include causal inference, machine learning, and data mining. He is particularly interested in developing well-founded theory and efficient methods for extracting actionable insight from large data and complex models. He has authored over 140 conference and journal papers. He received two teaching awards, three best paper awards, the ACM SIGKDD 2010 Doctoral Dissertation Runner-Up Award, and the IEEE ICDM 2018 Tao Li Early Career Award.
He was program chair for IEEE ICDM 2025, panel chair for SIAM SDM 2019, tutorial chair for SIAM SDM 2017, and program co-chair for ECML PKDD 2016. He co-organised ten workshops and co-lectured seven tutorials. He regularly reviews for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, ICDM, AAAI, AISTATS, and so on.
He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2009 from Universiteit Utrecht. Until 2013 he was a post-doctoral researcher at Universiteit Antwerpen. Before joining CISPA in 2018, he was an independent research group leader (W2) at the DFG Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction (MMCI) and a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics.