The Organizers

Hendrik is an assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and is affiliated with Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. His research focuses on planning, which is required for acting towards long-term goals; learning, which is required for acting in unknown environments; and the explainability of planning and learning, which is required for successful human-AI interaction. He has leading roles in collaborative projects with industry partners in sectors such as logistics and transportation, smart manufacturing, and sustainable energy. This includes the Horizon Europe project PEER in which he leads the AI work package and which features the use case of accessible route planning for the municipality of Amsterdam. Hendrik has extensive experience in organizing workshops and competitions at conferences such as IJCAI, ECAI, XAI, or LION.  

Mehrdad received a Ph.D. in computer engineering in 2021 and is now a postdoc researcher at the AI Lab at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research interests range from explainable AI and human-AI collaboration to solving complex multi-objective problems using Artificial Intelligence. After Ph.D. graduation, Mehrdad has been actively involved in several EU Horizon projects, such as SPATIAL and PEER, which aim to foster human-AI interaction via more transparent and explainable methods. Mehrdad has organized research tracks in conferences such as explainable sequential decision-making as part of the XAI World Conference 2025 (XAI-25).