Erman Acar

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 AI safety 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.