People with a mild intellectual disability (MID) experience more loneliness than people without MID. In the COLLELO project, researchers from social and humanities disciplines collaborate with people with MID and their (in)formal networks to create an (online) learning community that aims to understand…

PhD defence

Context-based learning has been implemented in secondary chemistry education. Hans Vogelzang, PhD at ICLON, reseached whether Scrum methodology might support creating context-based lessons. Scrum appears to be beneficial to learning outcomes. Defence on 10 November.

Reflective dialogue is an effective instrument for professional learning of teachers. This research considers the characteristics, development, stimulating and limiting conditions for reflective dialogues in the context of Dutch primary school teachers who collaborate and learn together. The goal is…

Implementation of the new sound synthesis and analysis method in music composition.

Assistant Professor Vedran Dunjko and his team received a gift from Google to support their quantum research. The research focuses on whether quantum computers can provide new ways of understanding the mysteries of high-energy physics.

The Academic Language Centre (ATC) is one of the cornerstones of Leiden University. Director Gea Hakker explains how this organisation is providing quality (online) language courses and meeting new demands.

From recurrent oil disasters to the outbreak of contagious diseases or major fires. Public organisations often learn too little from such crises, according to public administration specialist Wout Broekema. Staff frequently fail to communicate information adequately, which means that lessons are often…

What began as a PhD project has grown into a website with 120,000 unique visitors each year. With the platform OpenML, researcher Jan van Rijn is contributing to open science, aiming to make machine learning more transparent, accessible, and fair.

Promotor: J.N. Kok, Co-promotor: C.M. Soares, A.J. Knobbe

Why do we give students fictional assignments when there is a multitude of real-world problems just waiting to be solved? Leiden University, Leiden University of Applied Sciences and the Municipality of Leiden are joining forces with partners from the public sector in the Learning with the City project,…

Many people do not finish a MOOC. This does not match the goal of large scale online learning. Learners have different goals and backgrounds. Xiaomei Wei’s research looks at what keeps students engaged and what helps them to learn the course content deeply in a MOOC.

Cláudio de Sá predicted the preferences of people using rankings. He adjusted ‘classical’ machine learning approaches, making them suitable for predicting preferences. His work can be applied in the prediction of election results. PhD defence on 16 December.

From business administrator to engineer and from communication professional to agronomist. Whether you want to improve the world or your chances on the job market, you can continue to develop your skills at university throughout your life. Today, the universities of the Netherlands launched the new…

What are the characteristics of impactful education for student application of inclusive design principles in design and technology programs?

Assessing Learning in Higher Education addresses what is probably the most time-consuming part of the work of staff in higher education, and something to the complexity of which many of the recent developments in higher education have added. Getting assessment ‘right’– that is, designing and implementing…

What languages do you speak? According to Felienne Hermans, ‘Python’ could be an answer to this question. Hermans studies how people learn to program at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) of Leiden University. In an article of the NewScientist she explains why programming is similar…

The current dissertation presents a review study and three empirical studies, focusing on the understanding of the state of the art of research about PjBL in higher education and the investigation of the relation between PjBL and student outcomes in the context of Chinese higher education.

Artificial intelligence systems are smart. They can recognize patterns better than humans, for example. Yet humans are still very much needed. How can you better steer those AI systems? LIACS lecturer Jan van Rijn wrote a book about this together with a number of colleagues. We asked him a few quest…

Students at Leiden University College (LUC) learn about biodiversity not only in the lecture hall, but also in the natural environment. University lecturer Thijs Bosker and student Sebastiaan Grosscurt talk about using camera traps in a teaching and research project.

Artificial intelligence systems are smart. They can recognize patterns better than humans, for example. Yet humans are still very much needed. How can you better steer those AI systems? LIACS lecturer Jan van Rijn wrote a book about this together with a number of colleagues. We asked him a few quest…

The easy-to-learn programming language Hedy has been used more than 100,000 times in no more than 9 months. Felienne Hermans was a guest in the broadcast of the radio program Science071 to tell more about it.

In this project we study the properties of statistical- and rule-learning mechanisms in relation to the acquisition and evolution of language. We ask to what extent these mechanisms are unique to humans - or to human language - by comparing the acquisition of vocal structure in two species: humans (infants)…

It is a common technique in global optimization with expensive black-box functions to learn a surrogate-model of the response function from past evaluations and use it to decide on the location of future evaluations.

The Academy for Professionals project started in November. The project will focus on further developing existing and new educational programmes for professionals. ‘This is part of taking valorisation seriously.’

A study in the Behavioral Biology group of Carel ten Cate at the IBL showed that experience-dependent and -independent preferences influence song learning in zebra finches.

She has held office for over a hundred days, and is enthusiastic about what she has seen of the University thus far. Bursting with energy, she has plans aplenty for the teaching. An interview with ‘new’ Vice-Rector Magnificus of Leiden University, Hester Bijl.

Radiography is an important technique to inspect objects, with applications in airports and hospitals. X-ray imaging is also essential in industry, for instance in food safety checks for the presence of foreign objects.

Chinese and Leiden scientists came together in Leiden to study the intricacies of modern visual techniques.

The European Registry of Exonerations database provides an overview of miscarriages of justice in Europe with a view to preventing future errors.

Somatic symptoms, such as pain, itch, and fatigue have been shown to have a bidirectional relationship with mental symptoms. Although acute somatic symptoms serve some adaptive properties, chronic symptoms can instead lead to interference in daily activities and lower quality of life.

In this thesis, we aim to shed light on the diverse and often opposing roles of integrin α3β1 in cancer.