Willem-Paul Brinkman (1970) is an associate professor at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. His primary research interests are human-computer interaction, human-centred artificial intelligence, behaviour change support systems, specifically eHealth.  He is fascinated by eHealth systems that include artificial social agents (conversational agents) that offer psychological assessment, support, therapy, or training. His ultimate objective is to establish an (semi)autonomous eHealth system with a digital psychologist that can assist individuals in achieving a broad set of behaviour change goals ranging from overcoming mental illness to lifestyle modification for coping with a chronic illness. He is, therefore, determined to build these systems and establish an empirically grounded understanding of them. For this, he works on several research grants that focus on these types of eHealth systems such as a home-based virtual reality therapy system for patients with social anxiety, an autonomous e-mental health application for posttraumatic stress disorder patients, and also artificial social agents for people with sleeping problems, depression, nicotine addiction.

In 2003, he received his PhD degree in human-computer interaction from Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. In the following year, he obtained his Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education from Brunel University of West London, where he worked for five years as a lecturer, before moving in 2007 to Delft University of Technology where he became an assistant professor and later associate professor working in the Interactive Intelligence group. Over the years he has been involved in the organisation of several international conferences and workshops, and acted as an associate or guest editor of several journals. He worked on national research grants and has co-authored over 50 journal papers and 80 peer-reviewed conference and workshop publications. Since 2018, he is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 

Interview in the Quadraad about my research interests: adaptive mechanisms for behaviour change. Podcast interview (Dutch) about my research on software that supports people in changing their behaviour.

Main research interests.

• Human-Computer Interaction | Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
• Behaviour Change Support Systems
• Artificial social agents

Additional research interests

• Mental Health Computing, such as Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy systems
• Empirical research

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