About

Julius Kooistra is a Researcher at Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), working on applied and methodological research in digital finance and artificial intelligence.

He is co–Principal Investigator of AI Beacon, where his work centers on building and evaluating AI-based decision-support systems for high-stakes economic and public-sector settings. A core part of his applied research is conducted in collaboration with the Amt für Arbeitslosenversicherung (AVA), where he has worked on machine-learning pipelines to predict unemployment duration and on large-scale platforms that match job opportunities based on travel time rather than distance. These systems combine supervised and unsupervised learning with explainability methods to support transparent decision-making by caseworkers.

In parallel, Julius works on more fundamental research questions in digital finance and economics. His current projects include the study of agentic decision-making in economic environments and research on predicting leadership traits from facial images of CEOs, combining computer vision with economic and behavioral analysis.

Across projects, his interests lie in explainable and hybrid AI, decision-support systems, and the responsible deployment of AI in socio-economic and financial contexts.