Filip Ilievski

Filip Ilievski serves as an Assistant Professor of Commonsense AI (Sr.) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he leads the Learning and Reasoning Group. He holds additional affiliations as an Affiliated Scientist at USC Information Sciences Institute and Amsterdam Sustainability Institute, and serves as Scientific Coordinator of the Digital Sustainability Institute (DiSC). His academic journey includes a PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2015-2019), research positions at USC (2019-2023), and a research visit to Carnegie Mellon University (2017).

Dr. Ilievski's research focuses on advancing human-centric AI with common sense for social good applications. His work spans three interconnected areas: commonsense reasoning (including situational awareness, numeracy, and modeling of other agents), analogy and abstraction (studying cognitive generalization mechanisms through narratives and lateral thinking puzzles), and AI for social good (interpreting complex online media like internet memes and developing knowledge-based solutions for sustainable policies). He employs neuro-symbolic methods including prototype-based networks, combining LLMs with deterministic engines, and reasoning with scene knowledge graphs to create robust, interpretable AI systems.

His publication record shows a strong trend toward multimodal reasoning and practical applications of commonsense AI, particularly in understanding internet memes, developing sustainable AI solutions, and creating robust evaluation frameworks like the MARVEL benchmark. Recent work increasingly integrates cognitive theories with neural architectures to address limitations in current foundation models, with particular emphasis on explainability and cultural context awareness.

• Best Student Paper Award at K-CAP for 'Knowledge-enhanced Agents for Interactive Text Games'
• Best Paper and Best Presentation Award at Workshop on Multimodal Content Analysis for Social Good (MM4SG)
• Book 'Human-Centric AI with Common Sense' published in Springer Nature Synthesis series

Dr. Ilievski actively supervises a growing team of PhD students and postdocs, with current projects focusing on visual commonsense reasoning, meme semantics, analogical abstraction, multimodal alignment, and architectures for human-centric AI. His Digital Sustainability Institute (DiSC) coordinates research on knowledge-driven AI for sustainable policies, while his Situated AI minor program develops next-generation AI education. He maintains active collaborations with institutions including USC, CMU, RPI, University of Lyon, UvA, University of Bielefeld, and industry partners like Bosch Research, NEC Labs, Merit Technologies, and Tencent.