Organization
Organizational Committee
Femke Beute (Eindhoven University of Technology, NL) received her PhD in Human-Technology Interaction at Eindhoven University of Technology, where she currently works as post-doctoral researcher, investigating contextual influences on (the promotion of) health and wellbeing.
Robbert Jan Beun (Utrecht University, NL) is trained as an electrical engineer at the Technical University Eindhoven and received his PhD in pragmatics from Tilburg University (1989). He worked at the former Institute for Perception Research (IPO) in Eindhoven between 1985 and 2000. Currently, he is a lecturer in information science at Utrecht University. His research focuses on dialogue modelling and communicative strategies in settings for behavior change. He is project leader of the SleepCare project.
Timothy Bickmore (Northeastern University, USA) is a professor College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University. He is interested in development and study of relational agents. He focused his recent work within the healthcare domain on health education and health behavior change applications.
Tibor Bosse (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL) is Associate Professor in the Behavioural Informatics Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His main research interest is to enhance the believability and effectiveness of Intelligent Virtual Agents by endowing them with dynamic computational models of human behaviour, which are rooted in psychological and social theories. Such models enable IVAs to generate human-like behaviour as well as to understand it. His recent work has an emphasis on the use of IVAs for training of social skills such as aggression deescalation and cultural awareness.
Willem-Paul Brinkman (Delft University of Technology, NL) is assistant professor at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, working in the Interactive Intelligence group. His research focuses on behavior change support systems, focusing specifically on virtual reality systems and virtual health agents. He is involved in several research projects where these systems are applied to help chronic patients to self-manage their health, treat anxiety disorders, PTSD, insomnia, and depression.
Joost Broekens (Delft University of Technology & Interactive Robotics, NL) is assistant professor at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, working in the Interactive Intelligence group. His research interests include reinforcement learning, affective computing, human-robot and humancomputer interaction, and gaming research.
Franziska Burger (Delft University of Technology, NL) is a PhD candidate at the Interactive Intelligence Group, TU Delft. Her research focuses on virtual health agents that support knowledge workers in copying with their stress. She is specifically interested in generating therapeutic alliance between users and virtual agents to increase treatment adherence.
John-Jules Ch. Meyer (Utrecht University, NL) studied Mathematics with Computer Science and Digital Signal Processing at Leyden University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam on a subject in theoretical computer science in 1985. Since 1993 he has been a full professor of computer science, and artificial intelligence in particular, at Utrecht University. He has over 500 peer-reviewed publications in international journals and conference proceedings. In 2005 he was appointed as a Fellow of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence, nowadays the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI).
Mark Neerincx (Delft University of Technology & TNO, NL) is full professor Human-Centred Computing at TU Delft and principal scientist Perceptual and Cognitive Systems at TNO, The Netherlands. Recent research focuses on the situated cognitive engineering of electronic partners (ePartners) that support the social, cognitive and affective processes in human-automation collaboration to enhance performance, resilience, health and/or wellbeing. A current example is the Horizon2020 “Personal Assistant for healthy Lifestyle” (PAL) project that develops a physical and virtual robot for children with diabetes.
Rifca Peters (Delft University of Technology, NL) is a PhD candidate at TU Delft, interactive intelligence group. She is involved in the development of a PAL (robot and avatar) that provides cognitive and affective support to children with type 1 diabetes mellitus. Her research focuses on adaptive pedagogical interaction style for the PAL to enhance children’s motivation for learning and learning gain.
Albert “Skip” Rizzo (University of Southern California, USA) is Director for Medical Virtual Reality at Institute for Creative Technologies, and a research professor at the Department of Psychiatry and School of Gerontology, University of Southern California. He conducts research on the design, development and evaluation of virtual reality systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment rehabilitation and resilience.
Roelof de Vries (University of Twente, NL) is a PhD candidate at the Human Media Interaction group, University of Twente. His research involves designing motivational agent behaviors to encourage physical activity that can be used in a smartphone application targeting users with any physical activity level. This means the design of these behaviors needs to be global and broad, but also tailored to a specific user. Therefore, the research aims to combine an overall framework of behavior change while tailoring to specific user characteristics, like personality and gender.
Khiet Truong (University of Twente, NL) is an assistant professor in the Human Media Interaction group, University of Twente. Her interests lie in the automatic analysis and understanding of verbal and nonverbal (vocal) behaviors in humanhuman and human-machine interaction, and the design of socially interactive technology to support human needs. Having a background in (computational) paralinguistics and speech analysis, her main focus is on analysing the vocal modality of expression, in addition to the visual (e.g. facial expressions, eye gaze) and physiological modalities in social interaction.