My name is Floris den Hengst and I am an Assistant Professor on data science and AI for the human movement sciences. I have a particular interest in reinforcement learning in human contexts.
I am interested in (mutual) adaptivity v.s. control in learning systems, sequential decision-making problems, goal and constraint specification and uncertainty quantification. My research touches on practical and fundamental aspects of explainability and safety of AI.
For my PhD and postdoc, I did research in the Quantitative Data
Analytics and Learning &
Reasoning groups of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
ING’s AI for FinTech Research, and the [Hybrid Intelligence Center].
I have hands-on experience as a software engineer and data scientist.
- I am part of the Hybrid Intelligence Center
- I am a member of the Network Institute
- I am a member of Amsterdam AI
- I am a member of the [Amsterdam Institute for Sport Science](Amsterdam Institute for Sport Sience)
- I am (senior) PC member for various journals and conferences, including AAAI, ICML (2026 top-25%), NeurIPS, ICML, WWW, ECAI, ICAPS, ACL.
Experience
Assistant Professor, Human Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, current
PostDoc, L&R, Vrije Universiteit and AMlab, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2023-2026
PhD student and data scientist, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and ING, 2017-2023
Software Engineer, Crunchr, 2014 - 2017
Msc. Artificial Intelligence, Cum Laude, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2013 - 2016
Web Developer, Zilt&Co, 2009 - 2014
Various teaching- and research assistant positions, 2009 - 2014
Bsc. Artificial Intelligence, GPA 7.9 / 10, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2008 - 2013
Officially titled `Lifestyle Informatics’ at the time