HMI research: current and past projects

When we search online for information, we increasingly stumble upon ‘conversational social agents’ that try to help us with our information needs, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, or even embodied agents smiling at us from the screen and robots addressing us in the physical world. Children as well are exposed to these agents but we know very little about how children should preferably be addressed in such conversational transfer of information scenarios, nor how children, consciously or unconsciously, meet with the conversational type of interaction they get seamlessly pulled into.

The CoreSAEP project is an NWO Vidi personal grant about software that takes into account norms and values of people. The aim is to develop a new computational reasoning framework for Socially Adaptive Electronic Partners (SAEPs) that support people in their daily lives without people having to adapt their way of living to the software.

PRoSPEro Social robots are increasingly playing a role in social care professions. While the technological challenges and progress are substantial, and these technologies will be used by, or alongside, a range of social professionals, there has been little thought of how this might impact on their everyday work, career development and professional identity.

Hybrid Intelligence is a 10-year NWO-funded gravitation project (2019-2029). Hybrid Intelligence (HI) is the combination of human and machine intelligence, expanding human intellect instead of replacing it. The project’s goal is to design Hybrid Intelligent systems, an approach to Artificial Intelligence that puts humans at the centre, changing the course of the ongoing AI revolution.

The Harmony project investigates how we can develop robots that can autonomously manipulate objects and move around in human-centered environments in a safe and socially acceptable manner. Harmony will address both the technical and social challenges of bringing robotic mobile manipulation technology to the healthcare domain.

The 4TU research centre Humans & Technology (H&T) brings together the social sciences, humanities, and technical sciences. Its goal is excellent research on innovative forms of human-technology interaction for smart social systems and spaces. The research program “Smart Social Systems and Spaces for Living Well” (S4) aims to combine knowledge available from different disciplines, such as computer science, psychology, and industrial design.

In the Smart Sports Exercises project, new forms of indoor sports training are researched. This is done in a “smart indoor sports space”: an interactive floor capable of displaying video and realtime graphics, equipped with unobtrusive pressure sensing capabilities. A specially developed training system will offer interactive exercises.

This project focuses on the development of trust during Human-Agent Teamwork from a human-centered, cognitive psychological perspective. It investigates under what conditions we are willing to trust AI systems and what happens to that trust when our artificial “teammates” make mistakes, and specificallly what agents can do or say to restore broken trust.

Emotional expression plays a crucial role in everyday functioning. It is a continuous process involving many features of behavioral, facial, vocal, and verbal modalities. Given this complexity, few psychological studies have addressed emotion recognition in an everyday context. Recent technological innovations in affective computing could result in a scientific breakthrough as they open up new possibilities for the ecological assessment of emotions. However, existing technologies still pose major challenges in the field of Big Data Analytics.

WEAFING will develop innovative garments with integrated textile actuators, sensors, and electronics for haptic stimulation. We will advance the technology and manufacturability of electroactive fabrics resulting in lightweight and flexible textile actuators. Integration of the actuators in wearables takes into account different textile morphologies, soft mechatronics, producibility, and human perception. The garments developed will have a high level of wearability as the actuator is the garment itself and the technology is silent.

Tabaksverslaving is een complexe, chronische ziekte. Succesvolle behandeling is mogelijk, maar lastig voor kwetsbare groepen, zoals patiënten met psychiatrische aandoeningen, laag geletterdheid en/of een verstandelijke beperking. Zij hebben baat bij ‘doen’, ipv praten.

The proposed research will provide insights into the extent to which “Social Touch Technology” can affect people’s trust and decisions. More specifically, the research focuses on Virtual Reality (VR) interactions, during which a virtual agent applies social touches to the arm of the user in order to convince him/her during a discussion.

Introduction: The increasing availability of large amounts of (personal) data (Big Data) and the performance boost of advanced Human Language Technologies (HLT) hold great potential for self-management and empowerment in health and wellbeing. The topic of the project is the combination of text mining of Dutch written and spoken client [More...]

The Sports, Data and Interaction project is one of the four "theme teams" selected by the department of EEMCS to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration in the core strategic research areas of the department (as the Theme Team "Health"). The project combines expertise in measurement of athletes (Jasper Reenalda, BSS group), advanced statistical models for analysing and modeling the resulting data (Katharina Proksch, MOR group), and interaction technology for making the resulting insights useful in training context (Dennis Reidsma, HMI). Three PhD candidates, each working on one of the participating reserach groups, will collaborate on this project.