| university of twente |
HOW TO BECOME A ROBOT
Dirk Heylen is Professor Socially Intelligent Computing at the University of Twente. His research interests cover both the machine analysis of human (conversational) behaviour and the generation of human-like (conversational) behaviour 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 computational perspective and as basic research in the humanities, reflecting his training as a computational linguist.
After his studies of Linguistics, Computer Science and Computational Linguistics at the University of Antwerp he moved to the Institute of Dutch Lexicology in Leyden, to develop tools for enriching natural language databases. After a couple of years he went on to the Utrecht University and got involved in the big European project Eurotra on Machine Translation. After coordinating a follow-up EU project, he started his PhD project on a logical approach to natural language analysis and parsing (Type Logical Grammar).
At the University of Twente he started working on embodied dialogue systems (aka virtual agents or embodied conversational agents). This made his interests shift from pure linguistic analysis to body language, from text analysis to real-time human-machine interaction, and from the logical analysis to a much broader concern with emotion and social relations in interaction.
Over the years, he has had the opportunity to expand investigations in the full bandwith of multimodal communication. In the BrainGain project he was able to look at brain signals as a mode of human computer interaction and in the current COMMIT/ projects he is exploring interaction through “touch”.
He has been involved in several European projects such as Humaine, AMI and AMIDA, COST 2102, Semaine, SSPNET, SERA and Aria-Valuspa. Dialogue management, human behaviour modeling, cognitive modeling, human-robot interaction, methodological issues in corpus studies and annotation, are some of the topics dealt with in these projects.
Dirk Heylen is scientific director of the 3TU Humans & Technology: the Centre H&T started this year. Telepresence, smart spaces for happy and healthy living. These are the themes.
As of the 22nd of Setember he is the President of the AAAC - the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing.