Lecture: 'Socially intelligent computing research: an overview of research projects at the University of Twente'

Dirk Heylen will present the research of the Human Media Interaction group of the University of Twente, which is concerned with the perception-action cycle of understanding human behaviors and generating system responses, supporting an ongoing dialogue with the user. It stems from the premise that understanding the user –by automated evaluation of speech, pose, gestures, touch, facial expressions, social behaviors, interactions with other humans, bio-physical signals and all content humans create– should inform the generation of intuitive and satisfying system responses. His focus on understanding how and why people use interactive media contributes to making interactive systems more socially capable, safe, acceptable and fun.

About

Dirk Heylen has a degree in linguistics, computer science and natural language processing. His PhD thesis dealt with a formal, type-logical approach to grammar. When he moved to Twente, he started working on spoken dialogue systems with embodied (virtual) agents. He is currently professor Socially Intelligent Computing. His research interests cover both the machine analysis of human (conversational) behavior and the generation of human-like (conversational) behavior by virtual agents and robots. He is especially interested in the nonverbal and paraverbal aspects of dialogue and what these signals reveal about the mental state (cognitive, affective, social). These topics are explored both from a human-cantered and computational perspective.