- Speakers
Felienne Hermans
- Description
What is AI? What is AI for, and what are its goals? Can we use AI for programming? The dominant discourse in 2025 makes it easy to believe in 2025 that AI is unequivocally good, and will make our lives much easier.
In this talk Felienne, professor of Computer Science education will take you through an alternate history of AI, programming and its epistemological development. She will take you through over a century of alternative tech voices, and discuss what we can learn from that for the current state of programming and its future.
About Felienne Hermans
Felienne Hermans (picture) is a professor of Computer Science Education at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She also works as a high-school CS teacher one day a week at Open Schoolgemeenschap Bijlmer.
Felienne is the creator of the Hedy programming language, a gradual and multi-lingual programming language designed for teaching and author of the book "The Programmer's Brain" a book that helps programmers understand how their brain works and how to use it more effectively. In 2021, Felienne was awarded the Dutch Prize for ICT research.
She writes for Dutch newspaper Volkskrant every month and writes a weekly newsletter on computer science, AI and many other things (at www.felienne.nl)