Tarek R. Besold, PhD
PLEASE NOTE: This is my (mostly) science-focused web presence. For the professional side of my digital self please have a look at tarekbesold.com.
ABOUT: I am a Senior Research Scientist in the Barcelona office of Sony AI. I also serve as the chairman of the joint German Institute for Standardisation (DIN) and German Commission for Electrotechnical, Electronic, and Information Technologies of DIN and VDE (DKE) Working Committee on Artificial Intelligence (NA 042-01-42 GA) and as an advisor to the AI risk management start-up CalvinRisk.
Previously I was the Head of Strategic AI at DEKRA DIGITAL; CTO with acting managerial responsibility for technology/R&D, standardisation/certification and operations/HR at neurocat, a Berlin-based AI safety start-up; the Chief Science Officer (CSO) of Alpha Health, Telefonica Innovation Alpha's health tech Moonshot in Barcelona; 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
