Syed Ihtesham Shah
Postdoc at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Interpretable & Responsible AI, Inverse Reinforcement Learning, XAI, Multimodal Learning.
- Postdoc, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2023–present)
- Faculty, Learning and Reasoning Group
- Researcher, Institute for HPC, CNR, Italy (2022–2023)
- Visiting Researcher, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) (2021–2022)
- Junior Lecturer, NUML University (2015–2019)
- PhD, University of Naples (2019–2023)
- MSc, IIU Islamabad (2016–2018)
- BSc, NUML University (2010–2014)
Areas: Interpretable AI, Responsible AI, Inverse Reinforcement Learning, XAI, Multimodal Learning
News
- July 2026: Our paper "Addressing Incomplete Data in Survival and Quality of Life Prediction: A Pancreatic Cancer Case Study" won the Best Paper Award at AIME 2026.
- June 2026: I will be presenting our recent work on "Addressing Incomplete Data in Survival and Quality of Life Prediction: a Pancreatic Cancer Case Study" at PersOn consortium meeting in Utrecht, Netherlands .
- Feb 2026: For VU/UvA AI students: I am accepting thesis supervision students for Spring 2026; topics will be published on our group's Canvas page.
- I will be teaching AI in Health courses again in 2026.
- Delivered a talk on "Interpreting Model-agnostic Black-box Explanation Techniques" at the AI in Healthcare seminar at VU Amsterdam.
- Our paper on evaluation of explainability methods is available — the publicly accessible version is here.
- Organizing a two-day research activity in Utrecht for the Learning & Reasoning Group (VU) focused on reproducibility, replicability, and generalizability.
- Presented "Evaluation of Model-agnostic explanation techniques on healthcare dataset" at HealthInf 2025.
- Visited KU Leuven and presented research during a collaboration visit.
- Presented a poster at BNAIC 2025.
- Presented work on "Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Treatment Regimes" at the PersOn consortium meeting in Nijmegen.