Category: News

I am not sure whether it is a good sign to start every post with a sentence akin to: “sorry, I’ve been busy and this has been a ‘draft’ post for a few weeks now”, but anyway, big personal news to announce: after having completed my PhD and a postdoc position at HMI at the University of Twente I have accepted a new position at the Digital Society School in Amsterdam as senior researcher. I will be heading the research in the Digital to Physical track there.

It is not without a hint of sadness that I will be leaving the amazing place that is HMI. I am incredibly thankful to all the wonderful people I’ve met there and collaborated with throughout the years. I am sure future collaborations are on the cards! At the same time change is exiting and invigorating and I am very happy to join the DSS! What has me especially excited is the DSS’s dedication to researching and designing technology with an explicit focus on its potential benefits for society. This is exemplified by the DSS’s commitment to the UN’s sustainable development goals.

As senior researcher I will be working with a group of post-master trainees as well as students and professionals that make up the track’s projects each semester. I will further develop my line of research on social communication through physical interactions at the DSS while at the same time exploring related topics of research, such as tangible interaction design and interactions in physical spaces.

It has been a while since I last posted something here. Not due to a lack of things to report, but rather, the opposite. Here is a quick recap of what my 2017 looked like:

• As the last post before this one shows, I obtained my PhD! My thesis can be found here and there is still a limited number of physical copies (with special soft-touch cover!) available for those interested (get in touch!).
• I started working as a post doctoral researcher at the 4TU Humans & Technology Research Centre. The centre is a collaboration between the four technical universities in the Netherlands and focusses on researching human-technology interactions. At the centre I continue my work on haptics and social and affective touch.
• Since the beginning of 2017 I have also been working at a start-up I co-founded, called House of Haptics. We had a successful campaign on Kickstarter and, despite a few setbacks, we are close to launching our first product, HEY bracelet. More news on this will follow as we get closer to launch. In the mean time keep an eye on heybracelet.com!
• I have also joined the University of Twente’s Design Lab as a Research Fellow. The Design Lab is an exciting environment meant to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between science, business and government with the goal of tackling societal challenges. I will be making a contribution to defining the Design Lab’s research agenda.
• I collaborated with Thomas van Rompay (UT Communication Science) and Somaya Ben Allouch (Saxion, Technology, Health & Care) a proposal on the use digital nature environments (see also the previous work I did on this) to reduce loneliness in frail elderly. The basic idea behind the proposal is that exposure to digital nature can have beneficial health effects, can serve as a virtual meeting place and can act as a gateway for people to meet in real nature. The proposal was accepted by funding agency ZonMW and we will be looking to recruit a PhD student soon! (interested? Let me know!)
• I also worked on a European project proposal which, unfortunately, was not accepted and I worked on a touch-focussed proposal that is likely to be accepted. Mysterious, I know; more news soon!
• It has been a very long time in the making but my survey paper “Social Touch Technology: A Survey of Haptic Technology for Social Touch” has finally been published. You can find it here.
• Together with Carey Jewitt, Sara Price (of UCL’s InTouch project), and others I have worked on a CHI 2018 workshop proposal. The proposal was accepted and I will be sharing the call-for-papers soon!

It has been a while since the last update but I have a rather good excuse: last Friday, on the 24th of Februari, I successfully defended my PhD dissertation! My dissertation, which is titled “Social Touch Technology – Extending the reach of social touch through haptic technology“, is the culmination of five years of work on haptic technology for social and affective communication. It has been quite the journey and I am extremely grateful to everyone who has been involved in the research!

Though technically not a startup (yet, anyway), we were invited to show our Tasty Bits and Bytes project at the Future of High Tech event in Enschede. The event was part of the Startup Fest Europe, which is an effort to stimulate the growth of startups within Europe. The main event featured headline grabbing speakers such as Apple’s Tim Cook and Neelie Kroes (soon to be an adviser of Uber and board member of SalesForce).

At the Future of High Tech event we showed a setup that a group of students has been working on as part of the TB&B project. The setup was constructed for an experiment on the influence of visual stimuli on the perception and experience of flavor in yogurts. It works by projecting different shapes of different colors and with different animation speeds over a cup of yogurt.

We are currently analyzing the results of the experiment so more on this soon!

I have decided to add a new page to this website. The page carries the title “Public speaking” and contains information about talks, interviews or workshops I will give or have given.

In other workshop-related news: I’m co-organizer of two workshops that were accepted at EuroHaptics’16 and ICMI’16. The workshop at EuroHaptics will focus on the use of social touch in human-robot interaction. We are actually planning to design a small experiment during the workshop which we will then run during the conference. Should be exciting!

The ICMI’16 workshop is related to the Tasty Bits & Bytes project that I’m involved in, and will focus on technology in human-food interaction. More information about paper submissions for this workshop will follow soon.

Every year at HMI we organize the Media Technology course in which students build installations that focus on unusual uses of technology. This year the theme of the course was related to our very own Tasty Bits & Bytes project: Future Foods. We are very happy to announce that we are collaborating with Fooddock in Deventer to exhibit the students’ work. On the 28th of January from 17:00 until 20:00 six student groups will showcase installations that combine technology with food in interesting ways. Check here for more info (in Dutch).