Institute for Logic, Language and Computation

The Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation (ILLC) is a research institute of the University of Amsterdam, in which researchers from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities collaborate. The ILLC's central research area is the study of fundamental principles of encoding, transmission and comprehension of information. Emphasis is on natural and formal languages, but other information carriers, such as images and music, are studied as well.

Research at the ILLC is interdisciplinary, and aims at bringing together insights from various disciplines concerned with information and information processing, such as logic, mathematics, computer science, computational linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. It is organized in the three groups Logic & Computation (project leader: Ulle Endriss), Logic & Language (project leader: Robert van Rooij), and Language & Computation (project leader: Rens Bod) united by the key themes Logic and Game Theory and Cognitive Modelling.

In addition to its research activities, the ILLC is running the Graduate Programme in Logic (GPiL) with a PhD programme and the MSc in Logic, an international and interdisciplinary MSc degree in logic (GPiL webpage).

History

The ILLC started off in 1986 as Instituut voor Taal, Logica en Informatie (ITLI; Institute for Language, Logic and Information). In the beginning, it was an informal association of staff members from the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science and the Faculty of Philosophy, and was joined by computational linguists from the Faculty of Humanities in 1989. In 1991 the institute was officially established as a University Research Institute. During 1991–1996 the programming research group of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science was also part of the institute. The Applied Logic Lab from the Faculty of Social Sciences was part of the ILLC from 1996 to 2003. Other groups in computer science and cognitive science have associated themselves with the institute in 1996.

The ILLC is rooted in the Amsterdam logic research tradition dating back to the early twentieth century (including researchers such as L.E.J. Brouwer, Arend Heyting, and Evert Willem Beth). It considers Beth's Instituut voor Grondslagenonderzoek en Filosofie der Exacte Wetenschappen (founded in 1952) as its precursor.

Directors

• Johan van Benthem (1991-1998)
• Martin Stokhof (1998-2003)
• Frank Veltman (2003-2009)
• Jeroen Groenendijk (2009)
• Leen Torenvliet (2009-2011)
• Yde Venema (2011-2016)
• Sonja Smets (since 2016)

Members

Other notable members and past members include:

• Renate Bartsch
• Dick de Jongh
• Henkjan Honing
• Remko Scha
• Anne Troelstra
• Jouko Väänänen
• Michiel van Lambalgen

External links

• ILLC website