dr. SA (Sjoukje) Osinga

Sjoukje Osinga is Assistant Professor at the Information Technology group of Wageningen University, within the department of Social Sciences.

Her research interest lies in the dynamic between technology and application, or how to align ever advancing technological developments with the actual needs and concerns of end users and stakeholders of resulting applications. She has experience in using computational social science to simulate social behavioural processes in complex adaptive systems, and in natural language processing in its broadest sense. She is a very experienced and passionate teacher.

Sjoukje studied Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science in Groningen and Leuven (1991). Her PhD from Wageningen University was on agent-based modelling of knowledge (ABM) management in the pig sector. As part of her PhD research, she spent six months in China, where she studied information management of pig farmers and pork chain stakeholders.

She is currently involved in Aim for Scale, for innovation package Artificial Intelligence for Agriculture, harnessing AI to deliver scalable solutions for farmers" in low- and middle-income countries, funded by the Gates Foundation. 

She was formerly involved in H2020-EU-project Cybele , on big data in agriculture. Her contribution was to match problem-owners (in agriculture and livestock application domains) and solution-providers from big data and applied artificial intelligence. She was also involved in H2020-EU-project Dragon, on knowledge transfer of ABM and big data tools and techniques.

Sjoukje co-developed the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Big Data for Agri-Food: Principles and Tools. She is member of SiLiCo Centre Wageningen (Simulating Life Science’s Complexity), a virtual centre that acts as a portal to Wageningen University’s expertise on modelling complex systems through computational social science. Within CUCO, Center of Unusual Collaborations, she contributes to the development of a shareable health data dashboard with a use case in social support for grief recovery.

She has been a columnist of the university magazine Resource since 2022.