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 Director of the DAF Technology Lab, a cutting-edge virtual and mixed reality lab. Louwerse received his PhD in computational and psycholinguistics (University of Edinburgh) and received 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 over 170 articles in journals, proceedings and books in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics on a variety of topics, including symbol grounding, educational psychology, virtual reality. He holds two patents.
Louwerse served as principal investigator, co-principal investigator, or senior researcher on projects acquiring almost €40 million in both the United States and the Netherlands. In the US he was involved as a Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator in projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Institute of Education Sciences.
In the Netherlands he is involved as principal investigator in several projects, ranging from those on virtual and augmented reality, serious games and learning, natural language and data science solutions, an robotics and avatars, interactive embodied conversational agents for health care, and training in virtual reality. In addition, he is leading projects on virtual humans, augmented reality, and virtual reality.
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 has been founder of the DAF Technology Lab, the virtual and mixed reality lab on the Tilburg University campus, and is co-founder of the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science the graduate school is data science, and co-founder of MindLabs.
He has served for over 12 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 an several steering and advisory committees.
Louwerse is author of the popular science book Keeping those Words in Mind: How Language Creates Meaning, available in (online) bookstores. He is a frequent blogger of Psychology Today.