Frans Oliehoek

Full Professor Interactive Learning and Decision Making

Delft, South Holland, Netherlands

About

My main interests are in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, with expertise in specialized computational methods for decision making and decision support systems. The potential application area of such systems is huge, including for instance security and monitoring systems, traffic, logistics and supply chain management, but also trade and risk models in finance. Topics: Machine learning, sequential decision making, reinforcement learning & (approximate) dynamic programming. Multiagent systems. Markov models such as: MDPs, POMDPs and particularly decentralized POMDPs

Experience

  • Delft University of Technology (8 yrs 6 mos)
    • Professor
      Jul 2025 - Present · 1 yr 1 mo

    • Associate Professor
      Feb 2018 - Jul 2025 · 7 yrs 6 mos

  • Director at ELLIS Unit Delft
    Nov 2022 - Present · 3 yrs 9 mos

  • University of Liverpool (4 yrs)
    • Senior Lecturer
      Oct 2017 - Jun 2018 · 9 mos

    • Lecturer
      Jul 2014 - Oct 2017 · 3 yrs 4 mos

  • Veni Researcher at University of Amsterdam
    Jan 2014 - Feb 2017 · 3 yrs 2 mos

    Researcher in the Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) group of the Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam (ISLA). Working on my Veni project: "Transfer Planning for Decision Making in Distributed Systems" Description: Improved understanding of decision making in distributed systems is crucial for the development of information systems that can bring about substantial economic and social benefits. However, decentralized decision making (based on local information) is considerably more complex than centralized decision making. While communication can be used to share information, full synchronization of sensor data is typically not feasible for large-scale systems, and we must address the truly decentralized case. In my research I address fundamental questions about decentralized decision making, and make links to real-world applications such as control of urban traffic lights.

  • Maastricht University (2 yrs)
    • Assistant Professor
      Aug 2013 - Jan 2014 · 6 mos

      Assistant Professor in the Robots, Agents and Interaction group at the Department of Knowledge Engineering.

    • Postdoctoral Researcher
      Feb 2012 - Aug 2013 · 1 yr 7 mos

      Postdoc at the Swarmlab headed by Gerhard Weiß and Karl Tuyls. Working on multiagent learning and CATCH project Mining Social Structures from Genealogical Data.