Joris Baan

I am an ELLIS PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam working with Wilker Aziz, Barbara Plank and Raquel Fernández.

I am interested in understanding how large language models represent uncertainty, and if we can disentangle uncertainty that arises from the data (e.g., underspecified, subjective or ambiguous language) from uncertainty related to a model (e.g., lack of knowledge or reasoning). Ultimately, I think that uncertainty should power better decision-making.

I am part of the Dialogue Modeling Group in Amsterdam and MaiNLP at LMU in Munich. Previously, I interned at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle and spent 2.5 years as ML engineer at DPG Media working on large scale news recommendation.

News

• Jan 2025 - New 2-part blogpost series about building and deploying an AI app from scratch (see below).
• March 2024 - Check our new EACL-main position paper being presented in Malta: “Interpreting Predictive Probabilities: Model Confidence or Human Label Variation?”
• December 2023 - I presented our “What Comes Next” paper as an oral talk at EMNLP in Singapore.
• November 2023 - I am teaching assistant for two master AI courses at the UvA: NLP1 and DL1.
• October 2023 - We’re organising the First Workshop on Uncertainty-aware NLP (UncertaiNLP), co-located with EACL in Malta! Check out the website at https://uncertainlp.github.io/ and consider submitting your work!
• October 2023 - One paper accepted at EMNLP (main conference): camera ready coming soon!
• August 2023 - New preprint! “Uncertainty in Natural Language Generation: From Theory to Applications”
• July 2023 - Super excited to join AllenAI in Seattle as a research intern to work with Sarah Wiegreffe!
• May 2023 - New preprint! “What Comes Next? Evaluating Uncertainty in Neural Text Generators Against Human Production Variability”

Blogposts

Occasionally I write blogposts. You can find them below.

Can Coding Agents Help Write Scientific Code Responsibly?

I’ve been experimenting with Claude Code to write research code for several months now. When...

Posted by Joris Baan on October 17, 2025 · 13 mins read

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Thoughts on using AI for scientific research and software engineering

As a PhD candidate doing AI research, and a former ML engineer, I am not...

Posted by Joris Baan on July 09, 2025 · 10 mins read

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Designing, Building & Deploying an AI Chat App from Scratch (Part 2)

Cloud Deployment and Scaling

Posted by Joris Baan on January 14, 2025 · 34 mins read

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Designing, Building & Deploying an AI Chat App from Scratch (Part 1)

Microservices Architecture and Local Development

Posted by Joris Baan on January 14, 2025 · 31 mins read

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Implementing a Transformer From Scratch

7 Things You Might Not Know About the Transformer

Posted by Joris Baan on March 25, 2022 · 18 mins read

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