Education, research, and valorisation in informatics and AI, housed under one roof for the first time at Lab42

The building is more than just another new building. It is meant to create a new ecosystem. ‘Our mission is to do three things’, says the institute’s director Alfons Hoekstra, ‘top education, top research and impactful valorization. This is the first time we have all those three functions sitting together in one building. The third floor houses the co-creation space. Above that, are three floors with academic research, and below is all the teaching. We easily meet in this building. It feels like a unity, which we never had before. Education and research is of course what we have traditionally been doing. The third function, valorisation is relatively new, so it is exciting to see how it will play out to have it under one roof.’

The number of computer science students grew rapidly over the past decade and the Informatics Institute nearly doubled in size in this period, one of the reasons to build LAB42. That growth is expected to continue. At the same time the European Commission expects that in the future about ten to fifteen percent of the EU workforce will have a background in information technology, from all levels of vocational education to university education.

Check out LAB42’s office spaces and flex-work desks

Solution to a talent-shortage

LAB42 at the Amsterdam Science Park will provide office spaces tot he Institute for Informatics (IvI), the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), the Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence, as well as to entrepreneurs in the field of digital innovation and AI. It is thus the new home for students and experts in a quickly growing field. Professor de Rijke states: ‘There’s been a severe shortage of the kind of young talent we are educating. Master students are approached by businesses before they have even graduated. We are bringing these two worlds closer together and we are attracting talent to our region.’