Aske Plaat is a Professor of Data Science at Leiden University and scientific director of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS). He is co-founder of the Leiden Centre of Data Science (LCDS) and initiated SAILS, a multidisciplinary program on artificial intelligence. His research interests include reinforcement learning, combinatorial games and self-learning systems. He is the author of Learning to Play (published by Springer in 2020), which specifically covers reinforcement learning and games.