Mike Ligthart
Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam)
Nieuwegein, Utrecht, Netherlands
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolMike Ligthart is an Assistant Professor and social roboticist with 12 years of research and teaching experience focused on how interactive technologies shape behaviour and society. At Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam he leads the Growing Up Together program studying long-term child-robot relationships, combining cognitive AI expertise with hands-on deployment and public engagement. His work spans HRI, assistive tech and safety-critical sensing (exosuits, firefighter monitoring) and is grounded in practical system design and classroom instruction in software and mobile systems. Mike actively steers technological development toward societal benefit by collaborating across stakeholders rather than from an ivory tower. He brings a rare blend of academic rigor (cum laude MSc in Cognitive AI, PhD experience) and grassroots creativity—historically freelancing with limited resources to prototype social robot applications and explain them to broad audiences.
12 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc), Cognitive Artificial Intelligence, Cum Laude, Master of Science (MSc), Cognitive Artificial Intelligence, Cum Laude at Radboud Universiteit NijmegenBachelor of Science (BSc), Artificial intelligence, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Artificial intelligence at Radboud University Nijmegen
Dutch, English, German
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (10)
kotlin10
kotlin-library10
mongodb10
kotlin-coroutines10
java9
database9
scala9
jvm9
nosql7
react1
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
HeroProject/2020-Tobber98
Jun 2020 - Apr 2023
2020-Tobber98 created by GitHub Classroom
Contributions:1 PR, 1 push in 2 years 10 months
reactgithub-classroomjavascriptnodejsreactjs
HeroProject/HeroGoalAgent
May 2020 - Nov 2022
Contributions:1 release, 3 PRs, 105 pushes in 2 years 6 months
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