Erman Acar

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Room L5.24, LAB42, UvA

Science Park, Amsterdam

I am a tenured assistant professor of Safe & Explainable AI in Finance at the University of Amsterdam, where I lead Finesse Lab, which is part of the SIAS group.

I am affiliated with both the Informatics Institute and the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation, where I am part of the research units NLP and Theoretical Computer Science.

I am also a founding member and co-manager of the AI4FinTech initiative, and part of the management team of the Hybrid Intelligence Centre, a large national research project across Dutch universities with more than 80 PhD students.

With over 15 years of experience in AI, my work spans symbolic reasoning, neurosymbolic systems, causality, and multi-agent systems, with a particular interest in applications of safe and explainable AI in financial services. My research focus is on combining machine learning with symbolic and causal methods to build AI systems that are more capable of reasoning, collaboration, and explanation.

A pretentious fun fact is that I am one of the academic great-grandchildren of both Newton and Gauss, through Hilbert, Wittgenstein, and Russell.

news

Jan 15, 2026 Paper accepted at CVPR 2026: Same Content, Different Answers: Cross-Modal Inconsistency in MLLMs.
Jul 1, 2025 Paper accepted at ICML 2025: AI for Global Climate Cooperation: Modeling Global Climate Negotiations, Agreements, and Long-Term Cooperation in RICE-N.