About me
My interests lie in researching non-verbal aspects in speech communication (also known as paralinguistics) to develop voice and speech technology that enhances human-human and human-machine communication. I have worked on/am working on for example:
- Automatic analysis of affective states, mental states (e.g., depression, psychiatric disorders), physical states (e.g., exercise intensity)
- (Automatic) analysis of laughter (and other non-verbal vocalisations) in conversation
- Automatic generation of backchannels in conversation
- Prosodic synchrony in conversation
- Human-robot communication/interaction, e.g., voice design
Prior to HMI, I was employed by TNO Human Factors in Soesterberg where I worked towards my PhD on automatic emotion recognition in speech and automatic laughter detection. During my master research at Radboud University in Nijmegen, I worked on automatic pronunciation error detection in second language learners’ speech. I obtained my Master's in (computational) linguistics from Utrecht University.
Some keywords: paralinguistics / voice technology / social signal processing / affective computing / multimodal interaction / speech prosody / non-verbal vocalisations / laughter / dialogue / embodied conversational agents / human-human interaction / human-robot interaction / computer-assisted language learning / pronunciation error detection
Recent academic service (a summary):
- Interspeech: 2025 (General Co-Chair), 2023 (Lead Area Chair no. 3), 2022 (Lead Area Chair no. 3), 2021 (Lead Area Chair no. 3), 2017 (Area Chair), 2015 (Area Chair), reviewer since 2011
- ACM ICMI: 2024 (Program Co-Chair), 2023 (Publicity Chair), 2021 (Social Media Chair), 2020 (General Chair), 2012-2019 reviewer or Senior Program Committee
- ACM/IEEE HRI: 2024 reviewer, 2023 PC member, 2021 reviewer, 2019 reviewer, 2016 reviewer, 2015 reviewer
- HRI Pioneers: reviewer since 2021
- IEEE ACII, ACM IVA, IEEE ICASSP: i also review for these conferences
- Member of Editorial Board Computer Speech and Language 2021 - ...
- Associate Editor IEEE Transactions of Affective Computing 2019 - 2023