archives in liquid times
Martijn van Otterlo obtained his PhD (artificial intelligence, A.I.) from the University of Twente
(Netherlands, 2008) with a dissertation on expressive knowledge representation in machine
learning from evaluative feedback. He published two books on such adaptive learning algorithms
(2009 IOS Press; 2012 Springer, together with Dr. Wiering). Martijn has worked on robotics, vision
and language and held positions in Freiburg (Germany), Leuven (Belgium) and Nijmegen (The
Netherlands). His second research interest, which arose from his expertise in A.I., concerns the
ethics and implications of adaptive algorithms on privacy, surveillance and society. He has served
as committee member and reviewer for dozens of international journals and conferences on
machine learning, data science and artificial intelligence. In his current position at the Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands) he combines data science and ethics with his third
interest: libraries. He currently studies the digitalization of physical, public libraries, and also the
ethical consequences of datafication of library processes and services. More information can be
found at http://martijnvanotterlo.nl
Frans Smit is Information Governance Officer at the Dutch Municipality of Almere, and Teacher
of Archival Science at the University of Amsterdam. Educated as a historian, he has been working in
fields like software engineering, archives, libraries and information policy departments as a
developer, governance officer, manager and consultant. He publishes regularly in various journals,
predominantly about cross-boundaries between information disciplines. He was co-editor of the
S@P-Yearbook on archival inspection "Profiteer, profileer, prioriteer" (2013). He is a member of
the archival advisory committee of the Dutch Association of Municipalities (VNG) as well as a
member of the Records Management Expert Group (RMEG) of the International Council on
Archives (ICA). He is a consultant and a trainer for among others the National Archives of
Indonesia (ANRI, 2012-2013), the Dutch Archiefschool (2014-) and the Royal Association of
Archivists in the Netherlands (KVAN, 2017-).
Jacco Verburgt studied philosophy and theology in Amsterdam, Leuven, Berlin, and Rome. He is a
researcher at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. His current research focuses on Aristotle,
Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel, but includes applied science topics too. He also is an editorial board
member of Critique, which is an online publishing platform (see https://virtualcritique.wordpress.
com). He teaches philosophy (especially courses on history of philosophy, philosophical
anthropology, general and applied ethics, and philosophy of science) at various institutions of
higher education in the Netherlands.
Geoffrey Yeo is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Information Studies at
University College London (UCL), United Kingdom. Before joining UCL in 2000, he worked as an
archivist for the Corporation of the City of London, for St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and
for the Royal College of Physicians of London. He has also worked as a freelance archivist and
records manager, and as a consultant to the International Records Management Trust,
participating in records management and educational projects in The Gambia, Ghana, Botswana
and Uganda. In 2010 he was Visiting Professor at the School of Library, Archival and Information
Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
His research interests include conceptual understandings of records; perceptions of the origins and
scope of record-making and record-keeping; records' contextualisation and description; and
relations between records and the actions of individuals and organisations. He has published
widely on description and on conceptual understandings of records and is a frequent speaker on
these and related topics at international academic and professional conferences. His published
work won the Society of American Archivists Fellows' Ernst Posner Award in 2009 and the
Hugh A. Taylor Prize in 2013.
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