Erman Acar

Erman Acar is an Assistant Professor for Explainable AI in Finance at the University of Amsterdam, affiliated with the Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems (SIAS) group at the Informatics Institute (IvI) and the Cognition, Language and Computation (CLC) lab at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC). His research focuses on Neuro-Symbolic AI architectures that integrate machine learning with symbolic approaches (logical or causal) to enhance reasoning and explainability in single/multiagent scenarios, applied to financial services.

• Education: PhD in Computer Science (University of Mannheim, 2017), MSc in Computational Logic (TU-Wien/TU-Dresden, 2012).
• Previous Roles: Postdoctoral researcher at VU Amsterdam (2018-2021), Leiden University (2021-2022).

Research Trends: His recent work emphasizes causal discovery via meta-reinforcement learning, aligning with his Neuro-Symbolic AI and XAI themes. A PhD position (2022) highlights his focus on deploying these approaches for fairness and transparency in fintech.

Teaching: Co-teaches the course Interpretability & Explainability in AI (University of Amsterdam, 2023) and leads the AI4Fintech initiative.

Labs & Teams: Collaborates with the SIAS group (IvI), CLC lab (ILLC), and the upcoming AI4Fintech hub in Amsterdam.