Prof. dr. Max M. Louwerse is Professor in Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence at Tilburg University, and Professor by Special Appointment at Maastricht University, principal investigator at BISS. He currently serves as Scientific Director of the DAF Technology Lab, a cutting-edge virtual and mixed reality lab.
Before moving to the Netherlands, he filled academic appointments in the United Kingdom and the United States, where he worked for 18 years. Louwerse received his PhD in computational and psycholinguistics (University of Edinburgh) and received early tenure and promotion as Full Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS) at the University of Memphis, and served as Director of the IIS.
Louwerse published his interdisciplinary research in over 200 articles in academic outlets in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and linguistics, on a variety of topics, including symbol grounding, educational psychology, non-verbal communication and virtual reality. He holds two patents.
Louwerse served as principal investigator, co-principal investigator, and senior researcher on projects acquiring almost €50 million ($50 million) in both the United States and the Netherlands, often in collaboration with industry partners, ranging from measuring learning performance online, building virtual humans, developing brain-computer interface for air force pilots, developing augmented reality for surgery, and introducing geographic information systems for medical drones.
Louwerse is responsible for the scientific research behind SpaceBuzz, a non-profit organizations that creates ambassadors of planet Earth, by developing innovative technologies for education, including virtual reality, intelligent tutoring systems and artificial intelligence.
He is founder and scientific director of the DAF Technology Lab, the virtual and mixed reality lab on the Tilburg University campus, used for education and research, consisting of two Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) systems. He is co-founder of the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science the graduate school in data science, a collaboration between Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and Tilburg University, and co-founder of MindLabs, a collaboration between knowledge institutions and industry.
He has served for almost 15 years as Associate Editor of the journal Cognitive Science and has served on editorial boards of several journals in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. He serves on several steering and advisory committees.
Louwerse is author of the popular science book Keeping those Words in Mind: How Language Creates Meaning, and Understanding Artificial Minds through Human Minds. The Psychology AI (also translated in Dutch) available in (online) bookstores. He is a frequent blogger of Psychology Today, and a frequently asked public speaker.