Erman Acar

I am an assistant professor for Explainable AI in Finance at University of Amsterdam, as part of Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems (SIAS) group at the Informatics Institute (IvI), and the Cognition, Language and Computation (CLC) lab at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) in which I am affiliated with the units NLP and Digital Humanities and Theoretical Computer Science.

My research focus is on Neuro-Symbolic AI architectures (combining machine learning models with symbolic approaches –may it be logical or causal, including single agent or multiagent scenarios), to enable their capacity in reasoning and explainability and use these approaches to address real-world problems mainly in the domain of financial services.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning group at VU (2018 -2021) and in the Reinforcement Learning group at Leiden University (2021-2022). I did my PhD in Germany, University of Mannheim (2014-2017), and obtained my masters degree in Computational Logic from TU-Wien (Austria) and TU-Dresden (Germany)in 2012. Having a diverse research background, I made research visits to several institutions, including University of Bozen-Bolzano, University of Amsterdam, University of Calabria and University of Oxford.