About My Career

Daan Di Scala (MSc), born 1997 in The Netherlands, studied Artificial Intelligence at Utrecht University, receiving the cum laude distinction for both Bachelor and Master degree. After his Master thesis focused on privacy preserving AI agents, he started at TNO Data Science in 2023. TNO is the Dutch research institute for applied science, where Daan's research revolves around the trustworthiness of AI-driven decision support in high-stakes domains. In 2025 he started his PhD at Utrecht University on the topic of knowledge enhanced AI for trustworthy decision support.

About My PhD

My PhD is about: Knowledge Enhanced AI Advice Systems for Trustworthy High-Stakes Decision Support

My PhD Goal: to improve the trustworthiness of AI advice, by introducing knowledge-enhanced self-reflection to advice providing AI systems. This leads to users better being able to understand, follow/trace and evaluate the usefulness of the AI answers, so they can appropriately trust AI for decision support (leading to safer, more productive, more objective, more accountable, decisions).
Generative AI systems like ChatGPT are increasingly being used for help with decision making. However, for assistance with making tough decisions that lead to high-risk consequences (e.g., medical, judicial, business advice), these systems and the knowledge they provide have to be sufficiently trustworthy. In this PhD project, I aim to identify, formalize and capture different aspects that lead to appropriate trust (not under- or overtrust) in AI advice, to design hybrid AI systems that are a composite of data driven LLMs and knowledge driven models (Knowledge Graphs, Ontologies) that are able to adhere to these trust aspects, and to evaluate the trustworthiness of state-of-the-art AI advice, including existing software and proposed new methods, through both objective and user-centric evaluations.

About My Hobbies

Welcome to my personal little Recommendation Corner! It consists of things I enjoy in my spare time, as follows:

Movies: Arrival, The Truman Show, Luca, Train to Busan, Godzilla-1, The Holiday, Sinners, Airplane, The Italian Job, The Princess Bride, Bullet Train, Avatar 1-3, The Cornetto Trilogy
Series: FRINGE, Ted Lasso, Game Changer, The Walking Dead (SE1-SE4), SCRUBS, Derry Girls, FMA:B, ...
Video Games: Valheim, Potion Craft, Skyrim, Marvel Rivals, Overwatch 1, Raft, Portal, Hollow Knight, Assassin's Creed II, ...
Board Games: Scopa, Everdell, Machi Koro, Dominion, Similo, Chess, Betrayal, ...