VUlogoVU University Amsterdam

  • Short name: VUA
  • Country of origin: The Netherlands
  • Principal scientific contact person: Prof. dr. Heleen Riper
  • Website: http://vu.nl/en/index.asp

The VUA is a large, state funded university with over 26,000 students and over 2000 academic staff. It currently comprises twelve faculties, at which research in a wide variety of technical, natural and humanities disciplines is conducted. The VUA participates in two national research centres of excellence and forty accredited research schools. In E-COMPARED, three departments are involved: Clinical Psychology, Artificial Intelligence and Health Sciences.

Clinical Psychology

The department of Clinical Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology is one of the leading research groups in eMental health worldwide in examining the (cost-) effectiveness of (online) interventions including Individual Patient meta-analyses. The department is embedded in the EMGO+ research institute for health and care research and heads the Triple-E network.

Artificial Intelligence

Within the section of Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Sciences, two groups partake in E-COMPARED: Agent Systems and Computational Intelligence. The Agent Systems group provides analytical dynamical modelling methods and simulation-based methods. The Computational Intelligence group provides evolutionary algorithms, data mining, and predictive models for health and wellbeing.

Health Sciences

The department of Health Sciences is part of the Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences. The section Health Economics and Health Technology Assessment provides extensive expertise on the measurement and evaluation of costs from a societal perspective and on the analysis of cost-effectiveness data from the trials and computational models.

    Roles in E-COMPARED

    VU-Clinical psychology

    Overall project coordination and management
    Technical platform coordination
    Trial coordination (wp2) and cost-effectiveness analysis

    VU-Artificial intelligence

    Platform development
    Personalised modelling techniques

    VU-Health technology assessment

    Clinical cost effectiveness
    Economic modelling (DES)

    Key Personnel Involved

    Prof. dr. M.M. Riper, PhD (F) is professor of eMental health and works at the department of Clinical Psychology of the VUA in Amsterdam and at the University of Leuphana in Lüneburg. Her research is focused on the use of novel and innovative E-Health applications to promote the prevention and treatment of common mental disorders.

    Prof. dr. P. Cuijpers, PhD (M) is professor of Clinical Psychology and head of the department of Clinical Psychology at the VU University Medical Centre (VUmc). He is internationally acknowledged for his research in the area of depression prevention and guided self-help interventions for people with common mental disorders. He has also built a sound reputation as an expert in performing meta-analyses.

    Dr. A.M. Kleiboer, PhD (F) is assistant professor at the department of Clinical Psychology. Her research interests comprise finding the best evidence-based psychological treatments for people with common symptoms such as depression.

    Prof. dr. F. Smit, PhD (M) is professor of Evidence-Based Public Mental Health at the department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the VUmc. Prof. Smit has extensive knowledge of and expertise in psychiatric epidemiology, cost-of- illness studies, quality-of-life / burden-of-disease studies, randomised prevention trials and health-economic evaluation and modelling. He also holds a position as director of science at the Centre of Prevention and Early Intervention at the Trimbos Institute (Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction) in Utrecht.

    Dr. M.C.A. Klein, PhD (M) has been an assistant professor in the Agent Systems Research Group at the VUA-FEW since 2007. He has extensive experience in the field of artificial intelligence, especially in the areas of knowledge representation and modelling, knowledge-based systems and dynamic modelling.

    Prof. dr. J. Treur, PhD (M) has been heading the Artificial Intelligence section (40 researchers) at VUA-FEW since 1990. He is an internationally well-recognized expert in agent technology and biologically inspired cognitive modelling. He serves in various programme committees and editorial boards in these areas and has extensive experience in managing large (inter)national projects.

    Prof. dr. A.E. Eiben, PhD (M) is heading the Computational Intelligence group and former head of the Computer Science department (200 researchers). Prof. Eiben is a well-known expert in the domain of computational intelligence. He has been a co-organiser or organising committee member of a variety of conferences related to computational intelligence, and is involved in numerous science management bodies in that area.

    Dr. M. Hoogendoorn, PhD (M) is an assistant professor in the Computational Intelligence group. He has ample expertise in the domain of artificial intelligence and related areas. His main research focus is on adaptive systems and learning of predictive models for the domains of health and wellbeing.

    Dr. J. Bosmans, PhD (F) is assistant professor and has extensive experience with the design and analysis of economic evaluations in the field of elderly and mental care.

    Prof. dr. M. van Tulder, PhD (M) is professor of Health Technology Assessment at the department of Health Sciences and the EMGO+ institute. He (co) authored a huge number of publications on the cost-effectiveness of preventive and therapeutic interventions for chronic diseases.