About
Chris Develder is an Associate Professor with the research group IDLab in the Department of Information Technology (INTEC) at Ghent University - imec, Ghent, Belgium. He received his MSc degree in computer science engineering and PhD in electrical engineering from Ghent University in Jul. 1999 and Dec. 2003 respectively (as a fellow of FWO). He has held research visitor positions at UC Davis, CA, USA (Jul.-Oct. 2007) and at Columbia University, NY, USA (Jan. 2013 - Jun. 2015).
Prof. Develder leads two research teams within the Internet Technology and Data Science Lab (IDLab): one focused on converting text to knowledge (NLP, primarily information extraction using machine learning), and another on data analytics and machine learning for smart grids. His Text-to-Knowledge (T2K) research group has a strong track record in information extraction across various domains including news, human resources, and biomedical applications, as well as text classification tasks such as sentiment analysis. More recently, the group has expanded into conversational agents and generative models for educational applications.
With his team, Prof. Develder has published over 200 papers in international journals and conferences including EMNLP, CoNLL, EACL, ACL, ECIR, CIKM, WSDM, WWW, and NIPS. His recent publications demonstrate a growing focus on practical applications of NLP in healthcare (personality style recognition from speech, biomedical adverse drug event extraction), education (question generation, gap-filling exercises), and labor market analysis (career path prediction, skill extraction). His work bridges theoretical advances in machine learning with real-world applications across multiple domains.
Prof. Develder actively supervises PhD students and has co-supervised numerous successful doctorates, including Maarten De Raedt (2024), Semere Kiros Bitew (2024), Yiwei Jiang (2024), Amir Hadifar (2023), and Klim Zaporojets (2022). His former students have gone on to work at organizations including EarlyTracks, Zoom, Nokia Bell Labs, Clarivate, and various academic institutions.
