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, 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 informative causal models and patterns from large data, and putting these to good use. He has authored over 120 conference and journal papers. He received three best paper awards, the ACM SIGKDD 2010 Doctoral Dissertation Runner-Up Award, and the IEEE ICDM 2018 Tao Li Award.

He was part of the steering committee of ECML PKDD between 2016 and 2019, 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 six tutorials. He is associate editor of Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS) and member of the editorial board of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DAMI). In addition he regularly reviews for NeurIPS, KDD, ICML, AISTATS, and so on.

He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2009 from Universiteit Utrecht. Between 2009 and 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.