Tijl De Bie has been a Full Professor at the University of Ghent since 2015. Before moving to Ghent, he was Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Bristol (9 years), a postdoc at the KU Leuven (1 years) and the University of Southampton (1 year). He completed his PhD on machine learning and advanced optimization techniques in 2005 at the KU Leuven. During his PhD he also spent a combined total of about 1 year as a visiting research scholar in U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Davis.

He is currently most actively interested in data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI), and more specifically in the foundations and applications of (exploratory) Data Science. His focus is increasingly on automating Data Science, human-centric AI (interactivity, privacy, explainability, fairness), and structured data such as graphs. He currently holds a grant portfolio of around EUR 4M, including an ERC Consolidator Grant titled “Formalizing Subjective Interestingness in Exploratory Data Mining” (FORSIED), as well as an FWO Odysseus grant titled “Exploring Data: Theoretical Foundations and Applications to Web, multimedia, and Omics Data”.