Tarek R. Besold, PhD

ABOUT: I am the Chief Behavioural Officer (CBO) of Alpha Health, Telefonica Innovation Alpha's health tech Moonshot, as well as the scientific advisor of neurocat, a Berlin-based AI safety start-up. I also serve as the chairman of the German Institute for Standardisation (DIN) NIA Working Committee on Artificial Intelligence (NA 042-01-42).

Previously I was a Lecturer (i.e., Assistant Professor) in Data Science at City, University of London (UK), a postdoctoral researcher at the Digital Media Lab of the University of Bremen (Germany), and a member of the KRDB Research Centre at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (South Tyrol, Italy).

From 2011 until 2015 I had been working in the AI Research Group of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück (Germany), of which I still continue to be an associate member.

From January until June 2014 I also had been an academic visitor at the Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications (CISA) within the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK).

Finally, I was one of the people involved in the EU-funded Concept Invention Theory (COINVENT) Project.

CONTACT: If you want to get in touch with me, sending an email to FirstName.LastName(guesswhat)gmail.com (never mind the middle initial) usually works fairly well. Alternatively, try my LinkedIn profile.


RESEARCH: My main fields of academic interest are:

  • Analogies & non-standard forms of reasoning (which also was the main topic of my PhD).
  • Symbolic models of cognition and intelligence in AI.
  • Neural-symbolic integration.
  • Human-Level Artificial Intelligence.
  • Comprehensibility and Explanation in AI and Machine Learning.
  • Computational Creativity.


MISC: A few other things:

  • A (more or less up-to-date and/or complete) list of my publications can be found on Google Scholar...
  • ...and information concerning some of my former teaching activity is available here.
  • I frequently try my luck at public outreach and science communication to wider audiences than "only" the academic AI community.
  • ...oh, and finally there is an AI blog I maintained several years ago on the SciLogs (currently only in German): Analogia
(c) 2016 - Richard Zinken