An inspiring, leading scientific centre focused on research into artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, knowledge access and discovery, and games. This is what the founders of TiCC, the Tilburg Centre for Creative Computing, have in mind. The decision to found the centre was recently taken by the Executive Board of Tilburg University in the Netherlands. The centre will be headed by Professor of Computer Science Jaap van den Herik.

The research conducted at the centre, which is to start on 1 September 2008, will be concentrated around the themes of Vision and Language. These two avenues of research will be supervised by professors Eric Postma and Antal van den Bosch. Postma, professor of Artificial Intelligence, and Van den Herik come from the University of Maastricht and were attracted to build the centre, together with Tilburg professor Antal van den Bosch, into an internationally renowned research institute. Van den Herik, Postma and Van den Bosch have already worked together in various projects.

The centre is based at the Faculty of Humanities of Tilburg University, in which communication and culture are important spearheads. Within this framework, the initiators are working on a number of different projects in the programmes ToKeN (knowledge access) and CATCH (Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage) of NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

The TiCC research will be centred on artificial intelligence cognitive models (perception and language processing), human-computer interaction, games and serious gaming. With the foundation of TiCC, a number of state-of-the-art research projects will be stationed in Tilburg: the development of strong computer players in traditional board games (chess, go) and in modern computer games, and the development of systems for digital analysis of paintings of, among others, Vincent van Gogh.

Combined with the already existing Tilburg research on automatic solutions for language processing (translating, conducting dialogues), the centre aims at offering a nationally and internationally unique combination of expertise. The three professors will work together on exploring knowledge and information gathered from our visual and written cultural heritage, on improving the interaction between humans and computers, and on the new domain of serious gaming, in which through interaction with artificially intelligent systems people are involved in challenging game situations in which stimulate learning or behavioural change effortlessly.

Another objective of the centre is to organise events in which the general public can become acquainted with technologies developed at the centre, such as the international computer Olympiad in which computers take each other on in a series of games. The element of open competition will also be apparent in the central themes of Vision and Language: the centre will take an active part in international competitions. What system can recognize the most objects? What system yields the best translations? The centre will produce at least as many software systems as doctoral theses.

Prof. dr. Jaap van den Herik (1947) studied mathematics at the Free University of Amsterdam and got his PhD at the Technical University of Delft with the thesis Computerschaak, schaakwereld en kunstmatige intelligentie (Computer chess, chess world and artificial intelligence). His scientific career started at the Free University of Amsterdam and continued at the faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Technical University of Delft and the School of Computer Science of McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Since 1987 he has been Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maastricht and since 1988 Professor of Law and Computer Science at Leiden University (both in the Netherlands). He will be joining Tilburg University (fulltime) on 1 September 2008.

Prof. dr. Eric Postma (1961) studied cognitive science and psychology at Radboud University Nijmegen (called Catholic University of Nijmegen at the time) and got his PhD in 1994 at the University of Maastricht in the field of computer science. He is particularly interested in artificial intelligence and in modelling human perception (including visual perception) and cognition. From 1993, he worked at the University of Maastricht, initially as a university lecturer, and later as a senior lecturer and as professor of computer science. He will be joining Tilburg University on 1 September 2008.

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