Academic courses at the UvA

Courses at the UvA can be found in the Course Catalogue (for English, click the link at the top-right). You can look for individual courses or for Bachelor or Master's' programmes. In particular, PhD candidates can follow all the courses of the Master of Logic programme, many of which are research courses that are in fact taught at PhD level and and which often form the basis of courses that are taught by ILLC-staff members at international summer-schools to train PhD candidates. Courses in other relevant programmes, such as the Master in Artificial Intelligence and the Master Brain and Cognitive Science, are also available. PhD candidates at the ILLC attend on average around 15 ECTS of scientific courses during their PhD track.

 

Events at the ILLC and beyond

Over the course of a typical week during term time, there are multiple scienctic events at the ILLC and at neighbouring institutions, such as the Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) and the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC). Regular events at the ILLC, such as seminars and colloquia, can be found on the regular events page. For information on all events taking place at the institute, consult the list of ILLC news and events.

 

National research schools

The Netherlands has a large number of Research Schools. These are collaborative research and PhD training institutions in specific domains that often specialized scientific courses to PhD candidates. For example, ILLC PhD candidates can attend courses at LOT (Dutch Graduate School in Linguistics), SIKS (Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems), OZSW (Dutch Research School of Philosophy), ASCI (Advanced School for Computing and Imaging). A full list of Research Schools can be found here.

 

International summer schools

These are some of the most prominent summer schools for ILLC PhD candidates. If a relevant school or international training event is missing, please let Tanja Kassenaar know about it.

• The Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) is involved in the organization of several schools (ESSLLI, NASSLI, and EASLCC) that dissiminate advances in logic, linguistics, computer science, and cognitive science to master students and PhD candidates. A link to the different schools is available on the FoLLI website.
• The scandinavian logic society launched in 2013 with a series of annual spring schools in Logic. More information about the society and the schools they organize is available at their website.
• Carnegie Mellon University organizes a series of schools over the summers in logic and formal epistemology. More information here.
• The Association for Computational Lingustics (ACL) offers tutorials at its several conferences: ACL, NAACL (North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics), EACL (European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics), and EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing).
• The MosesCore EU project announces and sponsors a series of Machine Translation Marathon schools.
• Several international summer schools on machine learning are announced on the website Machine Learning Summer Schools. In particular, information on the Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School can be found here.

Research visits abroad

Spending some time abroad visiting a research group at another university with expertise that is relevant for your PhD project can be a very stimulating activity. This is specially advisable for those PhD candidates who aim at a career in academia or those who have never worked or studied outside of the Netherlands.

If a research visit to an external academic institution seems desirable, both the supervisor and the PhD candidate should actively be involved in planning such a visit in advance, to ensure that it is well integrated with the overall PhD timeline and research plan. Ideally, research visits abroad (of a few weeks or months) should take place in the second and/or third year and should be specified in advance in the Training and Supervision Plan.

Well before the start of the visit, together with your supervisor, you should submit a plan and budget to ILLC Office for permission from the director of the PhD Programme and the institute manager. Your plan should include information about the time period, the host institute and supervisor, the costs involved and how you plan to fund this.

In principle you can use your annual travel and summer school budget. PhD candidates at the FGw should first use up their so-called 'rugzakje'.

Financial matters