The "machine learning" research group is a subgroup of the Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence research group part of the Department of Computer Science at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. It is led by Profs. Maurice Bruynooghe, Hendrik Blockeel and Luc De Raedt and counts about 10 post-docs and 20 Ph.D. students representing virtually all areas of machine learning and data mining. The group focuses on machine learning and data mining research involving structured data, symbolic, logical and probabilistic representations, background knowledge and applies it techniques to challenging domains in the life sciences and action- and activity learning.
Machine learning research at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven was initiated in 1986, when Luc De Raedt started his Ph.D. studies under the direction of Maurice Bruynooghe. In the 90s, the group rapidly gained recognition for its seminal contributions to inductive logic programming. During this period, members of the group developed a number of well-known systems such as Clint, Claudien, Tilde, Warmr and ICL, many of which are now gathered in our wide-spread ACE-tool, and the activities of the group rapidly expanded into domains such as reinforcement learning and distance-based learning. Since then, the group focuses on applications in the life sciences (especially chemo- and bio-informatics), in constraint-based data mining and inductive databases, and statistical relational learning (combining probabilistic models with logic). In 2006, with the return of Luc De Raedt to Leuven, the group of Hendrik Blockeel and Maurice Bruynooghe essentially merged with the former machine learning lab at the University of Freiburg. It is now one of the largest machine learning labs groups in Europe.
Members of the group have been involved as coordinators or principle investigators in many European projects, including the ESPRIT III and IV projects ILP (Inductive Logic Programming I and II) and Aladin, the EU FP 5 and 6 IST FET projects APRIL (Application of Probabilistic Inductive Logic Programming I and II), IQ (Inductive Querying), SolEuNet?, and cInQ (Consortium on Inductive Querying) and are now involved in the EU FP 7 IST FET project BISON.
They have also acted as organizers and program-co-chairs of key events such as: ECML 93, ILP 95, BNAIC 02, ECML/PKDD 01 and 03, ICML 05, ACAI 07, ILP 07, MLG 08, SRL/ILP/MLG 09, and Benelearn 10. The group is also the key organiser of a bi-annual workshop, now known as the Spring meeting on Machine Learning.