He obtained his PhD in 1993 at the University of Antwerp, under the supervision of Jan Paredaens. He was a postdoc in 1994–1995 at INRIA Rocquencourt, under the supervision of Serge Abiteboul, and was a visiting scholar at UCSD in 1999, hosted by Victor Vianu. His main research expertise is in logical models and declarative languages for data management, broadly construed. He has developed data models and logic-based languages for a wide variety of applications, including graph data, complex objects, structured documents, spatial data, temporal data, workflows, data on the Web, even data stored in DNA. The relevance of this expertise to AI research is that logic forms the foundation for representing information, and for reasoning about knowledge. In addition, Jan has worked on topics in data mining. He is now working as a professor at DSI.
Maxime Jakubowski is a PhD Candidate at Hasselt University since 2020, working in the research group on Databases and Theoretical Computer Science. He studied Computer Science at Hasselt University and obtained a Master in Artificial Intelligence from Maastricht University. His main research interests lie within knowledge representation languages, and generally the use of logic to understand different aspects of Semantic Web technologies.