Jan-Willem van de MeentView profile
Associate Professor
Jan-Willem van de Meent is an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam where he co-directs the AMLab with Max Welling. He also maintains an Assistant Professor position at Northeastern University, though currently on leave while continuing to advise students and collaborate. His research develops AI models by combining probabilistic programming and deep learning, focusing on understanding inductive biases that enable models to generalize from limited data. His research spans multiple domains: Probabilistic programming frameworks and inference methods Inductive biases for generalization from limited data Physical system simulators incorporating domain knowledge Causal structure and symmetries in AI models Applications in robotics, NLP, healthcare, and physical sciences Van de Meent is one of the creators of Anglican, a probabilistic programming language based on Clojure, and currently develops Probabilistic Torch, a library for deep generative models extending PyTorch. He is writing a book on probabilistic programming (draft available on arXiv) and serves as co-chair of the international conference on probabilistic programming (PROBPROG). His recent publications show a strong trend toward developing more efficient inference methods for probabilistic models, exploring disentangled representations across vision and language domains, and applying these techniques to healthcare, robotics, and neuroscience. His work on nested variational inference, energy-based models, and state abstraction in reinforcement learning has been particularly influential. Awards and Recognition NSF CAREER award (2021) Van de Meent actively advises multiple PhD students and postdocs across interdisciplinary projects. His lab maintains strong collaborations with researchers in robotics, healthcare, neuroscience, and other scientific domains, applying advanced probabilistic modeling to challenging real-world problems. He also develops practical tools for the research community, making advanced inference techniques more accessible to practitioners.





