Institute for Logic, Language and Computation

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is a research institute of the University of Amsterdam, in which researchers from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities collaborate. The ILLC's central research area is the study of fundamental principles of encoding, transmission and comprehension of information. Emphasis is on natural and formal languages, but other information carriers, such as images and music, are studied as well.

Research at the ILLC is interdisciplinary, and aims at bringing together insights from various disciplines concerned with information and information processing, such as logic, mathematics, computer science, computational linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. It is organized in the three groups Logic & Computation (project leader: Yde Venema), Logic & Language (project leader: Robert van Rooij), and Language & Computation (project leader: Jelle Zuidema) united by the key themes Explainable and Ethical AI, Interpretable Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing, Cognitive Modelling, Logic, Games and Social Agency and Quantum Information and Computation. The ILLC is involved in several international collaborations among which we highlight the Joint Research Centre for Logic (JRC), a special collaborative partnership between Tsinghua University and the University of Amsterdam.

In addition to its research activities, the ILLC is running the Graduate Programme in Logic with a PhD programme and the MSc in Logic, an international top-ranked and interdisciplinary MSc degree in logic (MSc Logic webpage). In September 2018, the institute opened the Minor in Logic and Computation, welcoming local and international bachelor students. The programme of the Minor in Logic and Computation consists of 30 EC, chosen from a list of high-profile courses organised according to four themes: Mathematics, Philosophy, Theoretical Computer Science, and Computational Linguistics and AI.