 | Willem-Paul Brinkman (1970) is a full professor in digital behaviour change at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research focuses on human interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) for behaviour change, specifically systems in the health or training domain that include psychology-informed AI that offers psychological assessment, support, therapy, or training. He studies AI health solutions such as an anxiety control algorithm for virtual conversations, a persuasion and support algorithm, and a thought pattern recognition algorithm. His research incorporates these solutions in computer-based therapies and successfully tests them with health partners in clinical trials for people with specific disorders such as social anxiety, mild insomnia, or PTSD. Furthermore, he works on developing and validating measure instruments on technology adoption, usability, emotions, and recently on people interaction experience with artificial social agents. Brinkman is the Director of Studies of the master Data Science and AI Technology, and before this of the master Computer Science. |
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 200 peer-reviewed 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.
- Behaviour Change Support Systems
- Human-Computer Interaction | Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
- Artificial social agents
Additional research interests
- Mental Health Computing, such as Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy systems
- Empirical research