Members

Mitra is an associate professor at LIACS. Her research interest lies in spatio-temporal, time-series, and mobility data modelling. Specifically, she designs algorithms that extract patterns from such data in a fully automated manner. Her research targets applications in a broad range of urban, environmental, and industrial domains for which she has collaborations notably with the European Space Agency, Honda Research Institute, various municipalities, and researchers in other scientific disciplines.

Samira is a postdoc fellow in LIACS. She is also affiliated with Leiden Observatory. Her expertise is applying AI techniques on astronomical datasets. She completed her PhD at 2022 from University of Groningen as a part of DSSC (Data Science and System Complexity) group. With her background in computer science, her multi-disciplinary PhD between the two departments of computer science and astrophysics gave her an opportunity to collaborate with astronomers. She also has collaborated with ASTRON (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) as a form of an internship during her PhD.

Laurens is a PhD student at Leiden University supervised by dr. Mitra Baratchi, Prof.dr. Holger Hoos and Prof.dr. Peter van Bodegom. Prior to starting his PhD studies in January 2020, he joined the ADA research group in November 2019 as a Master student supervised by dr. Mitra Baratchi and Prof.dr. Holger Hoos.

Maedeh Nasri is a PhD candidate at the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology (Institute of Psychology) at Leiden University. Her PhD project is embedded in a larger research project called “Data‐driven, urban policymaking for social inclusion of young, vulnerable people” within the Centre for BOLD Cities, as part of the NWO-funded ‘Breaking the cycle’ project. Within this larger project, Maedeh will focus on designing algorithms that extract patterns representing individual and social behaviours of pupils; and their use of space; thus exploring the complex interaction patterns over time and in space of prosocial behaviour and its links with structural and functional developmental changes. Maedeh’s PhD project is supervised by Prof.dr. Carolien Rieffe, Dr Mitra Baratchi (LIACS), Dr Sarah Giest (Leiden University) and Dr Alexander Koutamanis (Delft University of Technology).

Julia started as a PhD candidate at the ADA Research group in September, 2022. She is supervised by Mitra Baratchi and Holger Hoos, as well as Ilse Aben and Bram Maasakkers from SRON. Previously, she completed her master degree in Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence at Leiden University. Her master’s thesis was on the topic of Automated Machine Learning for Earth Observation. She will continue to work on this topic during her PhD, in collaboration with ESA Phi-lab and SRON.

Khashayar started as a PhD candidate at the ADA Research Group in February 2024 under the supervision of Mitra Baratchi, Wessel Kraaij, and Saber Salehkaleybar. He completed a master’s in Computer Science: Decision and Knowledge Sciences at the University of Tehran, focusing on Explainable AI in Financial Markets. His research will be on Causal Machine Learning and Auto ML in collaboration with the LABDA MSCA Doctoral Network.

Can’s research interests include automated machine learning, dynamic data analytics, data mining and general machine learning. Currently she is working at project ‘Dynamic Data Analytics through automatically Constructed Machine Learning Pipelines’. This research aims at developing a platform for dynamic data analytics that is based on techniques for automatically constructing machine learning pipelines for the task at hand.

Nuno is a PhD student on the topic of Remote Sensing for conservation in Oostvaardersplassen. His research focuses on developing big data solutions based in Remote Sensing and advanced ecoinformatics tools to monitor the flora and fauna of the Oostvaardersplassen to help understand the animal and plant dynamics occurring in this unique ecosystem.

Gareth Kok is a data science masters students based in Hamburg Germany. He graduated from VUA with a bachelors degree in Computer Science and has since worked with a variety of companies as a dat scientist. Gareth’s masters thesis is focused on a comparative survey of few-shot learning classification algorithms in the remote sensing domain. Evaluating the performance of the various models under a number of real world scenarios, including cross-domain and class-imbalance experimentation.

Thomas is a Master’s student in Computer Science, with a specialization in Data Science. His ongoing thesis research project is centered on detecting groups within spatiotemporal data

Tobias is a Master student Data Science : Computer Science at Leiden University and joined the ADA group in March 2021. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in Data Science and Knowledge Engineering from Maastricht University (The Netherlands) in 2020. He is currently working on his master thesis project under supervision of Mitra Baratchi. His research is focused on applications of automated machine learning(AutoML) (including Neural Architecture Search(NAS)) in the domain of spatial-temporal data. The topic is broadly applicable in several active research fields including environmental science, sports data science, computer vision and urban computing.

Gerlise is a master’s student in Computer Science, following the Artificial Intelligence track. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Econometrics and Operations Research at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2020. Currently, she is working on her master thesis under the supervision of Mitra Baratchi and Tom Claassen. Her research focuses on automated machine learning for causal discovery.

Sharanda is a 3rd-year Data Science & Artificial Intelligence Bschelor’s student supervised by Julia and Mitra. Her thesis is about improving classification tasks on satellite imagery with image super-resolution techniques.