The IRLab Amsterdam is part of the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam. Our research focuses on information retrieval: technology to connect people to information. We work on search engines, on recommender systems, and on conversational assistants. There is a heavy emphasis on data-driven methods, for understanding content, for analyzing and predicting user behavior, and for make sense of context.

We combine fundamental, experimental and applied research, and we do so using a broad range of data: text, images, structured information. We are involved in a large number of projects with other groups, both within and outside academia. Our research is funded by NWO, KNAW, the EU and through a range of public-private partnerships. We are strong believers of great science with great impact and greatly value an entrepreneurial spirit.

The IRLab grew out of the Information and Language Processing Systems (ILPS) group and was founded on September 1, 2020. We are proud to have a large and diverse team, with people from over 15 countries, bringing a rich spectrum of perspectives on the challenges that we choose to research.

The IRLab Amsterdam is proud to be engaged with a number of ICAI Labs: AIRLab Amsterdam, the Elsevier Discovery Lab, the Mercury Machine Learning Lab, the Police AI Lab, and more to come.

To contact us, please reach out to the director of The IRLab Amsterdam, Evangelos Kanoulas.