4TU Humans & Technology

The 4TU research centre Humans & Technology (H&T) brings together the social sciences and technical sciences. Its goal is excellent research on innovative forms of human-technology interaction for smart social systems and spaces.
4TU Delft
4TU Eindhoven
4TU Twente
4TU Wageningen

Latest updates

News
H&T PhD Writing Seminar
H&T PhD Writing Seminar
In May, the 4TU.H&T PhD students self-organized a 3-day writing retreat by the beach in Makkum, Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands. Writing is critical to all PhD students, yet it is often a solitary activity. The main goals were to get peer feedback early on and to improve drafts in progress. Both are essential to healthy collaborative research, the greater aim of our 4TU Federation.
Monday 22 May 2017
News
Gijs Huisman has joined the S4 team
Gijs Huisman has joined the S4 team
This year, Gijs Huisman joined the  4TU.H&T project Smart Social Systems and Spaces (S4). Gijs is a postdoctoral researcher at the Human Media Interaction group of the University of Twente. His research focusses on how haptic technology (technology that addresses the sense of touch) can be used for social and affective interaction in mediated communication and in interactions with artificial social entities such as virtual agents and social robots. In addition, he has a keen research interest in multimodal interaction, in particular, nature-inspired ambient technology for well-being and technology for human-food interaction.
Monday 1 May 2017
News
Seminar on Computational Social Science
Seminar on Computational Social Science
On the 7th of April, Dong Nguyen (The Alan Turing Institute, London) and Vincent Traag (Leiden University) gave a 4TU.H&T seminar on Computational Social Science. More than 20 people (researchers, phd students, masters' students) participated! In the first part of the seminar presented by Dong, students learned about computational sociolinguistics and how to apply natural language processing techniques to social data. Using NTLK, students explored methods for tokenization, part of speech tagging, sentiment analysis and topic modelling, and applied these to Reddit data. 
Thursday 20 April 2017
Past Events
3rd Dutch Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch
3rd Dutch Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch
After two very interesting get-togethers in 2015 and early 2016, we organized the 3rd “Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch in the Netherlands” - also known as the slightly more convenient “Dutch Touch”. This third meeting was held on December 21st in the Volkshotel in Amsterdam. The series of Dutch Touch meetings was initiated to bring together people from various disciplines who are all working on the topic of touch. Since the start of the series, nearly 60 people – researchers, artists, designers, and people from industry – have already indicated their interest in the meetings. This demonstrates that a lot is happening in the area of social and affective touch in the Netherlands. It also provides interesting opportunities.
Wednesday 21 December 2016
Past Events
4TU.H&T Symposium Machine Smarts and Human Values: designing a humanistic future
4TU.H&T Symposium Machine Smarts and Human Values: designing a humanistic future
On Thursday 13 and Friday 14 October, the symposium on Machine Smarts and Human Values took place at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The first day was organized specifically for PhD students from the 4 Universities and had the theme ‘Collaboration’. One of the core values of the 4TU consortium is to promote cooperation between research institutes. To this end, about 20 PhD students from different departments of the different Universities came together to find and discuss common interests. These discussions were triggered by a talk given by Dr. Daniel Lakens about the importance of collaboration in science, after which a speed dating session really brought the PhD’s closer together. During this session some very nice couples and groups were formed. Later that day they worked together developing collaborative proposals for combined research or follow-up events. The best ideas from those proposals were awarded and the next events are already being planned. In the end this day showed many PhD students that they have more in common than they think, opening up possibilities for collaborations between the Universities.
Friday 14 October 2016
Past Events
eNTERFACE'16 at the University of Twente
eNTERFACE'16 at the University of Twente
The 12th Summer Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces, also known as eNTERFACE’16, was hosted by the Human Media Interaction group from the University of Twente (July 18th - August 12th, 2016). Four weeks long, students and researchers from all over the world came together in the DesignLab at the University of Twente to work on 9 different projects on multimodal interfaces. In total, there were about 70 participants from 16 different countries ranging from the USA to Malaysia and from the UK to Australia.
Monday 22 August 2016
Past Events
Interdisciplinary Insights into Group and Team Dynamics
Interdisciplinary Insights into Group and Team Dynamics
The workshop was hosted by the Lorentz Center at the Snellius venue which has an approximate limit of 25 places. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the workshop received 36 applications and due to the space limitations, we had to be quite strict with reducing the numbers of attendees. From this list, we had a total of 27 attendees for which 23 attended the full workshop programme. The list was carefully selected to have an even balance between researchers in computer science and researchers in group science. The aim of the workshop was to work towards a white paper where the interdisciplinary struggles of both computer scientists and group researchers who analyse human behaviour in group settings could be investigated and clarified for the community.
Thursday 21 July 2016
Past Events
4TU.H&T Symposium on Supportive Technology
4TU.H&T Symposium on Supportive Technology
On Wednesday, 22 June 2016, the 4TU.Humans&Technology Research Centre organised a symposium on Supportive Technology for People with Dementia and their Caregivers in 'de Nonnerie’ in Maarssen. We were delighted to welcome participants from 6 elderly care organisations, 11 research institutes, 1 end user organisation, and 5 SMEs. During the day, 4 speakers gave talks about their interdisciplinary research projects. Furthermore, during interactive sessions, the audience was challenged to debate questions related to collaborative research between academia, health care institutes, and industry. In addition to the plenary sessions, we organised poster and demo sessions, where 13 posters, and demos were presented by industry and academia providing an overview of the state of the art in this field in the Netherlands. We thank all attendees for their participation and hope we will see each other again at one of the other upcoming events of the 4TU.H&T Research Centre.
Wednesday 22 June 2016
Past Events
4TU-H&T Workshop on Human-Agent Experience Sharing
4TU-H&T Workshop on Human-Agent Experience Sharing
On Thursday May 26th, the 4TU.Humans&Technology Research Center organised their first workshop on Human-Agent Experience Sharing. We were delighted to welcome participants from 7 companies in the Netherlands: Thales, Jutten, Tinybots, Almende, CleVR, TNO, and SiMyGenes. In addition, researchers from Delft University of Technology and the University of Twente were present. During an interactive session, the attendees discussed the requirements and scientific challenges faced by the industry in the area of human-agent experience sharing. In addition, the attendees discussed how industry and academia can join forces to overcome these challenges, so stay tuned!
Thursday 26 May 2016
Past Events
Rapid prototyping of Man-Machine Interaction with Arduino
Rapid prototyping of Man-Machine Interaction with Arduino
On April 7, 2016, 10 students participated in our hands-on workshop on "Rapid prototyping of Man-Machine Interaction with Arduino", hosted by the faculty of Industrial Design at Delft University of Technology, in their brand new studios. 
Thursday 7 April 2016
Past Events
A Practical Primer on Frequentist and Bayesian Statistics
A Practical Primer on Frequentist and Bayesian Statistics
The first 3TU.H&T workshop, "A Practical Primer on Frequentist and Bayesian Statistics", was held on March 4, 2016. Twenty-five young researchers from 9 different universities attended the workshop where Daniel Lakens gave an introduction to Frequentist statistics and Alexander Etz, a visiting scholar from abroad, gave an introduction to Bayesian statistics.
Friday 4 March 2016
Past Events
2nd Dutch Meeting on the Study of Affective Touch
2nd Dutch Meeting on the Study of Affective Touch
On January 20, 2016 we organized the second Dutch meeting on the study of affective touch, or Dutch Touch, for short. The aim of the meeting was to discuss some central topics related to the study of affective touch, and to get a notion of what each of the participants thought would be central themes for future research. Additionally, some interesting demos of haptic devices and applications were shown at the event.
Wednesday 20 January 2016
Past Events
3TU.H&T-SIKS PhD Autumn School was a success!
3TU.H&T-SIKS PhD Autumn School was a success!
With more than 50 students, 5 keynote speakers, and 9 lecturers, the school was a huge success! Keynote speakers included Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow, UK), Daniel Gatica-Perez (Idiap-EPFL, CH), Mohamed Chetouani (University of Pierre and Marie Curie, FR), Joyce Westerink (Eindhoven University of Technology/Philips), and Stephan Lukosch (Delft University of Technology). A diverse program with practicals and lectures was offered with topics related to social signal processing, psychology 2.0, and research and design methods. 3TU.H&T is planning to organize similar events in the future so keep an eye on the website for new announcements!
Tuesday 3 November 2015
Past Events
Intelligent Virtual Agents Doctoral Consortium
Intelligent Virtual Agents Doctoral Consortium
The Intelligent Virtual Agents 2015 Doctoral Consortium was held on Monday, the 24th of August, two days before the main IVA conference (26th of August - 28th of August, 2015).  The session was chaired by Khiet Truong and Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson.
Monday 24 August 2015
Past Events
1st Dutch Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch
1st Dutch Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch
In order to meet an increasing interest in the topic of social touch research from a diversity of disciplines, we organized the 1st Dutch Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch in Utrecht on July 3rd, 2015.
Friday 3 July 2015
Past Events
Results of the 3TU.H&T kick-off meeting
Results of the 3TU.H&T kick-off meeting
On April 16 the kick-off meeting of the new 3TU Centre for Humans and Technology was held in the DesignLab at the University of Twente. The centre aims to promote collaborations between the three technical universities in the Netherlands in the field of Human-Machine Interaction and to make their research and activities on this topic internationally visible.
Thursday 16 April 2015
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4TU Humans & Technology

Latest updates

News
H&T PhD Writing Seminar
H&T PhD Writing Seminar
In May, the 4TU.H&T PhD students self-organized a 3-day writing retreat by the beach in Makkum, Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands. Writing is critical to all PhD students, yet it is often a solitary activity. The main goals were to get peer feedback early on and to improve drafts in progress. Both are essential to healthy collaborative research, the greater aim of our 4TU Federation.
Monday 22 May 2017
News
Gijs Huisman has joined the S4 team
Gijs Huisman has joined the S4 team
This year, Gijs Huisman joined the  4TU.H&T project Smart Social Systems and Spaces (S4). Gijs is a postdoctoral researcher at the Human Media Interaction group of the University of Twente. His research focusses on how haptic technology (technology that addresses the sense of touch) can be used for social and affective interaction in mediated communication and in interactions with artificial social entities such as virtual agents and social robots. In addition, he has a keen research interest in multimodal interaction, in particular, nature-inspired ambient technology for well-being and technology for human-food interaction.
Monday 1 May 2017
News
Seminar on Computational Social Science
Seminar on Computational Social Science
On the 7th of April, Dong Nguyen (The Alan Turing Institute, London) and Vincent Traag (Leiden University) gave a 4TU.H&T seminar on Computational Social Science. More than 20 people (researchers, phd students, masters' students) participated! In the first part of the seminar presented by Dong, students learned about computational sociolinguistics and how to apply natural language processing techniques to social data. Using NTLK, students explored methods for tokenization, part of speech tagging, sentiment analysis and topic modelling, and applied these to Reddit data. 
Thursday 20 April 2017
Past Events
3rd Dutch Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch
3rd Dutch Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch
After two very interesting get-togethers in 2015 and early 2016, we organized the 3rd “Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch in the Netherlands” - also known as the slightly more convenient “Dutch Touch”. This third meeting was held on December 21st in the Volkshotel in Amsterdam. The series of Dutch Touch meetings was initiated to bring together people from various disciplines who are all working on the topic of touch. Since the start of the series, nearly 60 people – researchers, artists, designers, and people from industry – have already indicated their interest in the meetings. This demonstrates that a lot is happening in the area of social and affective touch in the Netherlands. It also provides interesting opportunities.
Wednesday 21 December 2016
Past Events
4TU.H&T Symposium Machine Smarts and Human Values: designing a humanistic future
4TU.H&T Symposium Machine Smarts and Human Values: designing a humanistic future
On Thursday 13 and Friday 14 October, the symposium on Machine Smarts and Human Values took place at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The first day was organized specifically for PhD students from the 4 Universities and had the theme ‘Collaboration’. One of the core values of the 4TU consortium is to promote cooperation between research institutes. To this end, about 20 PhD students from different departments of the different Universities came together to find and discuss common interests. These discussions were triggered by a talk given by Dr. Daniel Lakens about the importance of collaboration in science, after which a speed dating session really brought the PhD’s closer together. During this session some very nice couples and groups were formed. Later that day they worked together developing collaborative proposals for combined research or follow-up events. The best ideas from those proposals were awarded and the next events are already being planned. In the end this day showed many PhD students that they have more in common than they think, opening up possibilities for collaborations between the Universities.
Friday 14 October 2016
Past Events
eNTERFACE'16 at the University of Twente
eNTERFACE'16 at the University of Twente
The 12th Summer Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces, also known as eNTERFACE’16, was hosted by the Human Media Interaction group from the University of Twente (July 18th - August 12th, 2016). Four weeks long, students and researchers from all over the world came together in the DesignLab at the University of Twente to work on 9 different projects on multimodal interfaces. In total, there were about 70 participants from 16 different countries ranging from the USA to Malaysia and from the UK to Australia.
Monday 22 August 2016
Past Events
Interdisciplinary Insights into Group and Team Dynamics
Interdisciplinary Insights into Group and Team Dynamics
The workshop was hosted by the Lorentz Center at the Snellius venue which has an approximate limit of 25 places. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the workshop received 36 applications and due to the space limitations, we had to be quite strict with reducing the numbers of attendees. From this list, we had a total of 27 attendees for which 23 attended the full workshop programme. The list was carefully selected to have an even balance between researchers in computer science and researchers in group science. The aim of the workshop was to work towards a white paper where the interdisciplinary struggles of both computer scientists and group researchers who analyse human behaviour in group settings could be investigated and clarified for the community.
Thursday 21 July 2016
Past Events
4TU.H&T Symposium on Supportive Technology
4TU.H&T Symposium on Supportive Technology
On Wednesday, 22 June 2016, the 4TU.Humans&Technology Research Centre organised a symposium on Supportive Technology for People with Dementia and their Caregivers in 'de Nonnerie’ in Maarssen. We were delighted to welcome participants from 6 elderly care organisations, 11 research institutes, 1 end user organisation, and 5 SMEs. During the day, 4 speakers gave talks about their interdisciplinary research projects. Furthermore, during interactive sessions, the audience was challenged to debate questions related to collaborative research between academia, health care institutes, and industry. In addition to the plenary sessions, we organised poster and demo sessions, where 13 posters, and demos were presented by industry and academia providing an overview of the state of the art in this field in the Netherlands. We thank all attendees for their participation and hope we will see each other again at one of the other upcoming events of the 4TU.H&T Research Centre.
Wednesday 22 June 2016
Past Events
4TU-H&T Workshop on Human-Agent Experience Sharing
4TU-H&T Workshop on Human-Agent Experience Sharing
On Thursday May 26th, the 4TU.Humans&Technology Research Center organised their first workshop on Human-Agent Experience Sharing. We were delighted to welcome participants from 7 companies in the Netherlands: Thales, Jutten, Tinybots, Almende, CleVR, TNO, and SiMyGenes. In addition, researchers from Delft University of Technology and the University of Twente were present. During an interactive session, the attendees discussed the requirements and scientific challenges faced by the industry in the area of human-agent experience sharing. In addition, the attendees discussed how industry and academia can join forces to overcome these challenges, so stay tuned!
Thursday 26 May 2016
Past Events
Rapid prototyping of Man-Machine Interaction with Arduino
Rapid prototyping of Man-Machine Interaction with Arduino
On April 7, 2016, 10 students participated in our hands-on workshop on "Rapid prototyping of Man-Machine Interaction with Arduino", hosted by the faculty of Industrial Design at Delft University of Technology, in their brand new studios. 
Thursday 7 April 2016
Past Events
A Practical Primer on Frequentist and Bayesian Statistics
A Practical Primer on Frequentist and Bayesian Statistics
The first 3TU.H&T workshop, "A Practical Primer on Frequentist and Bayesian Statistics", was held on March 4, 2016. Twenty-five young researchers from 9 different universities attended the workshop where Daniel Lakens gave an introduction to Frequentist statistics and Alexander Etz, a visiting scholar from abroad, gave an introduction to Bayesian statistics.
Friday 4 March 2016
Past Events
2nd Dutch Meeting on the Study of Affective Touch
2nd Dutch Meeting on the Study of Affective Touch
On January 20, 2016 we organized the second Dutch meeting on the study of affective touch, or Dutch Touch, for short. The aim of the meeting was to discuss some central topics related to the study of affective touch, and to get a notion of what each of the participants thought would be central themes for future research. Additionally, some interesting demos of haptic devices and applications were shown at the event.
Wednesday 20 January 2016
Past Events
3TU.H&T-SIKS PhD Autumn School was a success!
3TU.H&T-SIKS PhD Autumn School was a success!
With more than 50 students, 5 keynote speakers, and 9 lecturers, the school was a huge success! Keynote speakers included Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow, UK), Daniel Gatica-Perez (Idiap-EPFL, CH), Mohamed Chetouani (University of Pierre and Marie Curie, FR), Joyce Westerink (Eindhoven University of Technology/Philips), and Stephan Lukosch (Delft University of Technology). A diverse program with practicals and lectures was offered with topics related to social signal processing, psychology 2.0, and research and design methods. 3TU.H&T is planning to organize similar events in the future so keep an eye on the website for new announcements!
Tuesday 3 November 2015
Past Events
Intelligent Virtual Agents Doctoral Consortium
Intelligent Virtual Agents Doctoral Consortium
The Intelligent Virtual Agents 2015 Doctoral Consortium was held on Monday, the 24th of August, two days before the main IVA conference (26th of August - 28th of August, 2015).  The session was chaired by Khiet Truong and Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson.
Monday 24 August 2015
Past Events
1st Dutch Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch
1st Dutch Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch
In order to meet an increasing interest in the topic of social touch research from a diversity of disciplines, we organized the 1st Dutch Meeting on the Study of Social and Affective Touch in Utrecht on July 3rd, 2015.
Friday 3 July 2015
Past Events
Results of the 3TU.H&T kick-off meeting
Results of the 3TU.H&T kick-off meeting
On April 16 the kick-off meeting of the new 3TU Centre for Humans and Technology was held in the DesignLab at the University of Twente. The centre aims to promote collaborations between the three technical universities in the Netherlands in the field of Human-Machine Interaction and to make their research and activities on this topic internationally visible.
Thursday 16 April 2015