Prof.dr.ir. J. (Jan) van den Berg

Prof.dr.ir. J. (Jan) van den Berg

Contact

Ruimte: 31.b3.170

Profiel

 

Latest news:

  1. My, 21 pages counting, on invitation written, paper entitled "Present-day Cybersecurity: actual challenges and solution directions" has been prepublished November 19 2014: it is a chapter in the Intech Open (Access) book with working title "Key Issues in Network Protocols and Security", ISBN 978-1-83634-335-6 (to appear February 2025)
  2. Our paper entitled "Unmasking Phishing Attempts, A Study on Detection in Spanish Emails" has been published November 19 2024 within the Springer LNCS series, volume 15369 as part of the proceedings of the 27th Iberoamerican Congress on Progress in Pattern Recognition, Image Analysis, Computer Vision, and Applications, CIARP 2024, held in Talca, Chile, during November 26-29, 2024.
  3. From January to April 2025, I'll provide two courses in Dutch on Artificial Intelligence, a longer one (10 weeks) in Tilburg, a shorter one (6 weeks) in Rotterdam. Both courses are of 'hovo'-type (higher education for elderly people). Interested people can now register at the given websites.
  4. Our paper entitled "Tax Underreporting Detection Using an Unsupervised Learning Approach" has been published on October 17, 2024 in the Springer Proceedings of the MICAI2024 conference, within the  Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (LNAI, volume 15247).
  5. October 8 2024, the Nobel Price of Physics 2024 has been awarded to two AI-pioneers/giants named John. J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton. I'm truly excited about this news since my 1996 PhD-thesis was largely devoted to a further analysis and generalization of the recurrent neural models John Hopfield described in the 1980-ies.

General overview:

My LIST OF MY PUBLICATIONS (version April 11 2024) contains detailed information about nearly all my publications. My research output (including my most recent articles published) can also be inspected from this TUDelft website (only output resulting from my time at TUDelft) or from this scholar.google website (also includes research output produced at other institutes).

Below a description of my topics of research is provided, grouped in 4 clusters:

I. Development of Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA) methods for Improved Decision Making

  • Theories on the combination of Probability Theory and Statistics on Fuzzy Sets like probabilistic fuzzy entropy, statistical fuzzy histograms, statistical fuzzy decision trees, statistical fuzzy information sources and, more in general, probabilistic fuzzy systems; see, e.g., our 2012 IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems publication. Most of this work was executed in close cooperation with Uzay Kaymak.
  • Visualizations of Concept Relations:  attempts to construct aggregated knowledge structures (like Associative Concept Maps) representing the essential knowledge as induced from a large corpus of (un)structured information sources. For details, see the work done by Nees Jan van Eck and Ludo Waltman at www.vosviewer.com
  • Simulated Big Bounce (for a nice simulation example see here!!): is a new metaheuristic proposed by former PhD student Mohsen Davarynejad for finding the gobal optimum of complex (high-dimensional) continuous functions by balancing exploration and exploitation.
  • More recently, I co-authored, often in close cooperation with Vitali Herrera-Semenets and Lázaro Bustio-Martínez, among others, various papers describing new types of Machine Learning algorithms for detecting cyberspace-fraude like intrusion attempts, social engineering attempts, and more. See my recent research output.

II. Theory and Applications of Complex Systems (with emergent properties based on self-organisation at the edge of order & chaos)

  • Concerns the theory especially pioneered at the famous Sante Fe Institute concerning the paradigm of looking bottom-up instead of top down: systems consisting of many interacting components (from atoms till human beings) may show complex emergent phenomena (from temperature and pressure in gases till dynamic markets and exciting paradigm shifting research outcomes in well-performaing research communities): see e.g. my publication "Inverse Infrastructures at the Edge of Order and Chaos, an Analytic Framework", chapter 2 of Tineke Egyedi and Donna Mahos (eds.) Inverse Infrastructures: Disrupting Networks from Below, Edward Elgar, 2010. 
  • When I started in this field, I looked at generalized (recurrent) neural networks from a mathematical-physical perspective: it resulted into my PhD work (original repaired version) on "Neural Relaxation Dynamics" (a topic related to Simulated Annealing) which focused on two types of neural networks:
  • Later on, this scope broadened towards applications with other complex systems' techniques in the field of Computational Intelligence like
    • Ants Algorithms for Bankruptcy Prediction and Bond Rating;
    • Particle Swarm Algorithms for Portfolio Optimization;
    • Genetic Algorithms for Index Tracking.

III. (Information Systems) Safety, Security, Risk and Related Topics

  • Developing a holistic, socio-technical view on Cyberspace and Cybersecurity;
  • (Quantitative) modeling of all kinds of risk;
  • Cyber Security solutions for IT-infrastructures, in domains like government, transport & logistics, finance, healthcare, energy supply;
  • Trust enhancing algorithms in mobile and P2P networks;
  • Resilience enhancement of Cyber Warfare Infrastructures;
  • Threat and fraud detection in Cyberspace (see also above under IDA methods).

IV. (Other) Applications in Finance, Sustainable Development, Philosophy, Healthcare (in many cases by using IDA tools):

News Driven Financial Time Series Analysis; Scaling Laws for Operational Risk Analysis; Visual Explorations in Finance with Self Organizing Maps, Google Maps, ...; Modeling Sustainable Development and Decision Making using Fuzzy Systems; Providing Intelligent Agents with Moral Reasoning Capabilities; Privacy Enhancing Technologies for Dynamic Informed Consent Decision Making;  ICT Tools for supporting Independent Living; Workflow Management and the Electronic Patient Record for realizing Client-Centered Healthcare; Improving Business Performance by KPI-based analysis of business processes performance; Data mining for Forensics and Intrusion Detection; Towards a production environment for (mobile) Apps in the Port of Rotterdam.

 

 

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Onderzoeksinteresses

They have already been described in the four categories I to IV above.

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Academische achtergrond

Having finalized my secundary school in Dordrecht (Gemeentelijk Lyceum, gymnasium-B ) in 1970, I studied mathematics and physics at the TUDelft while being active in the national student movement. In 1977, I received the diplome of Mathematical Engineer.

From 1977-1989, I lectured courses in mathematics, physics and computer science on institutes of higher education in Breda and Eindhoven, and mathematics and physics at the secundary school of Nampula, Mozambique.

From 1989-2006, I worked at the Econometric Institute of Erasmus University Rotterdam. There, I lectured courses in computer science and economics, and did research in many fields, especially in computational intelligence, with applications in combinatorial optimization, finance, agriculture, philosophy, bibliometrics, among others. My PhD-thesis entitled "Neural Relaxation Dynamics" (original repaired version) was finalized in 1996.

From 2006 up till now, I worked at TUDelft again, mostly on topics related to (Big) Data Analytics and/or Cyber Security. On July 9 2013, I was appointed as Full Professor Cyber Security at this university both at the faculty of EEMCS and that of TPM. A video of my inaugural lecture entitled "Real Cyber Security: Virtually Impossible?" is available here. Another, somewhat more popular talk in Dutch about Cybersecurity, I provided in Diligentia for the "Koningklijke Maatschappij voor Natuurkunde", in The Hague, on 16-2-2014. It can be viewed here.

June 2015 I have been appointed as (currently emeritus) Full Professor Cyber Security at Leiden University as well, namely at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs. 

During my academic career, I supervised - next to providing lecturers in all kind of scientific fields - around 20 students when writing their BSc-theses, more than 190 students when composing their Msc-theses, and around 20 students with their PhD-theses.

Due to my age, I'm now working as an emeritus pensionado... ;-). So, I have got time, next to other activities like writing papers, supervising research, preparing two HOVO-courses on Artificial Intelligence (in Tilburg and Rotterdam), and piano playing, to train and run additional marathons. See also this Rotterdam marathon website under "Mannen" (you have to scroll down!): my current Super Marathon Masters ranking 14 (on row 14 iin the list) is mentioned as the first one of in total six "32 times finishers". Next to Rotterdam, I ran 5 other marathons: two times in New York, and one time in Amsterdam, Berlin and Cologne.

Meer academische achtergrond

Expertise

Publicaties

Onderwijs 2020

Onderwijs 2019

Media

Prijzen

Contact

Ruimte: 31.b3.170