Vanessa Evers

Coordinator of the DE-ENIGMA project (University of Twente)

Her research focuses on the social aspects of Human Robot Interaction, the design of effective robot behaviours and acceptance of robot technology in the context of people’s daily life.

Dirk Heylen

Dialogue management and affective computing (University of Twente)

Dirk Heylen is a leading scholar in the field of virtual humans and social signal processing. He leads a group that focuses on investigating and building Intelligent Systems that interact naturally with humans.

Daphne Karreman

Human-robot interaction (University of Twente)

Daphne Karreman is a PhD student at the Human Media Interaction group and the research she do is on human-robot interaction. Her focus is on creating a fun, engaging and smooth human-robot interaction. Her research topic is about the development of personality and behavior of a Fun Robotic Outdoor Guide to have satisfying human-robot interaction.

Furthermore, she works on the development of intuitively understandable behavior, specifically for robots that do not closely resemble people.

Bob Schadenberg

He is working on the development of robot behaviours and the decision models that drive these behaviours. (University of Twente)

Bob Schadenberg is a PhD candidate at the University of Twente, with a background in psychology and AI.

Vicky Charisi

(University of Twente)

Vicky Charisi has been a researcher at the Human Media Interaction group. Her research interests lie in the ways that we can use humanoid and non-humanoid robots to design novel learning environments for children’s holistic and creative development.

Jamy Li

(University of Twente)

Jamy Li (MASc, Toronto; PhD, Stanford) is an Assistant Professor in human-media interaction research at the University of Twente. He is interested in the design of the interactive robot game for autistic children and how that game affects children’s closeness with the robot. He leads the University of Twente team, who is contributing to WP4 as experts in interaction design, design studies and robot behaviour generation.

Daniel Davison

(University of Twente)

Daniel Davison is a PhD candidate at Human Media Interaction. He has a background in building interactive educational systems for primary school children, in which he focused on designing supportive robot behaviours to scaffold inquiry learning processes. In DE-ENIGMA he will work on dialogue management and robot behaviour generation.

Pauline Chevalier

(University of Twente)

Pauline Chevalier is a Post Doc at the Human Media Interaction group. Her research is on human-robot interaction for children on the autism spectrum. 

Bridgette Connell

Day-to-day project manager for DE-ENIGMA (University of Twente)

Bridgette Connell is specialized in HIV research. She joined in 2018 the EU Project Management Team in the Strategic Business Development Division at the University of Twente. Her first task in her new position is to be part of the DE-ENIGMA project.

Lynn Packwood

Day-to-day project manager for DE-ENIGMA (University of Twente)

Aurélie Baranger

Responsible for the dissemination strategy (Autism-Europe)

Aurélie Baranger has been the Director of Autism-Europe since 2007. Her mission includes the overall coordination of the network of member associations, and the management of the advocacy and policy work, EU liaison, European projects, events, capacity building and finances.

Cristina Fernández Álvarez de Eulate

Dissemination Officer for DE-ENIGMA

Cristina Fernández joined Autism-Europe in 2015 as Communication and Fundraising Officer. She is in charge of its communications, events, campaigns and European projects. She holds an Executive Master in Communication and European policy as well as a Master in Journalism.

Liz Pellicano

Design, implement and analyse the evaluation of the HRI system of the DE-ENIGMA project (University College London)

Liz Pellicano is Professor of Autism Education and Director of the Centre for Research in Autism and Education (CRAE) at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. She is committed to understanding the distinctive opportunities and challenges faced by autistic children, young people and adults and tracing their impact on everyday life – at home, at school and out-and-about in the community.

She is also dedicated both to ensuring that the outcomes of her research are as influential as possible in education policy-making and to enhancing public understanding of autism, its challenges and opportunities.

Together with her team at UCL IOE, she is responsible for designing, implementing and analysing the evaluation of the HRI system in London, testing whether it has a positive impact on autistic children’s behaviours, and whether this impact generalises to real-life interactions in the playground.

Teresa Tavassoli

Design, implement and analyse the evaluation of the HRI system of the DE-ENIGMA project (University College London)

Teresa completed her psychology training in Germany at the University of Constance before finishing her PhD at the University of Cambridge with Simon Baron-Cohen. Before starting at the Center for Research in Autism and Education at UCL in London in May 2016, she worked at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai at the Seaver Autism Center in New York where her research focussed on sensory perception in autism and its variation across the entire population. Her research is dedicated to identifying robust sensory assessments and to elucidate underlying mechanisms of sensory reactivity, which can be used to guide diagnosis and sensory-based treatments and test treatment effects.

Eloise Ainger

Design, implement and analyse the evaluation of the HRI system of the DE-ENIGMA project (University College London)

Eloise completed a dissertation on ‘Attitudes and Behaviour of Parents towards their Child’s ASD Diagnosis and its Effects on Child Development’ as part of her undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Derby. Before joining CRAE, Eloise completed an MSc in Research in Clinical Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and worked as an Assistant Psychologist in a CAMHS team in Bedfordshire.

Alria Williams

Design, implement and analyse the evaluation of the HRI system of the DE-ENIGMA project (University College London)

Alria undertook a Masters degree in Mental Health Studies at King’s College London, where her dissertation explored the relationship between behavioural inhibition (e.g., the tendency to withdraw from unfamiliar situations) as a marker of anxiety and sensory sensitivities in children whose sibling have an autism diagnosis. Prior to joining CRAE, Alria worked with autistic children, adults, and those with mental health conditions as a Support Worker, as well as, an Assistant Psychologist facilitating psychoeducational groups of autistic adults. 

Alyssa M. Alcorn

Design, implement and analyse the evaluation of the HRI system of the DE-ENIGMA project (University College London)

Alyssa M. Alcorn is a member of the Centre for Research in Autism and Education (CRAE) at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. She completed her PhD in human-computer interaction at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. Her work investigated how novel and surprising computer game elements can motivate children with autism to initiate communication. Alyssa has specialised in designing and evaluating technologies to support and teach young children on the autism spectrum, with a particular focus on social communication. Prior to her PhD, she worked at Heriot-Watt University on the ESRC/EPSRC ECHOES technology-enhanced learning project, which created a touch-screen virtual environment for teaching social and communicative skills to young children with autism. Her background is in psychology, research methods, and design, with an MSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh, and a BA in Psychology from Mills College (California).

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Carlos Neves

Integration of the several systems present in the setup of the DE-ENIGMA Robot. (IDMind)

Carlos Neves is a Software Developer at IDMind, Portugal, and also a PhD Student in Institute for Systems and Robotics, from Instituto Superior Técnico.

Henrique Póvoa

Integration and networking of the various systems for the DE-ENIGMA project.

Henrique Póvoa is a Computer Science undergraduate student at Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa and software Developer at IDMind.

Paulo Alvito

System integration and validation of the DE-ENIGMA Robot. He will also contribute to the road-mapping of the commercial exploitation of the project results. (IDMind)

Paulo Alvito is Co-Founder and CEO/CTO of IDMind.

Carlos Marques

System integration and validation of the DE-ENIGMA Robot. (IDMind)

Carlos Marques is Co-Founder and R&D manager at IDMind. He will be responsible for the study, development and customization of the robot hardware platforms.

Vlad Olaru

3D intelligent sensors, real-time systems and high-performance computing for computer vision programs with emphasis on human pose estimation. (IMAR)

Vlad Olaru is a key person within several EU-funded as well as national projects targeting the development of real-time OS software to control the next generation 3D intelligent sensors (with emphasis on power management and distributed control in ad-hoc wireless sensor networks), real-time Java for multi-core architectures, servers based on clusters of multi-core architectures, high-performance computing for computer vision programs.

Cristian Sminchisescu

Mathematical modeling for computer vision and machine learning (IMAR)

Cristian Sminchisescu focuses on mathematical modeling for computer vision (articulated objects, 3D reconstruction, segmentation, and object and action recognition) and machine learning (optimization and sampling algorithms, structured prediction, sparse approximations and kernel methods).

Elisabeta Marinoiu

Gesture recognition, stance detection and augmented reality (IMAR)

Elisabeta Marinoiu’s research interests span the fields of machine learning and computer vision, with focus on gesture recognition, stance detection and augmented reality.

Alin Popa

Computer vision and machine learning (IMAR)

Alin Popa works on gesture recognition with range-data Kinect devices, human pose recognition and augmented reality. His research areas are computer vision and machine learning.

Mihai Zanfir

Action recognition and human pose estimation (IMAR)

Mihai Zanfir’s research interests focus on 3D graphics, machine learning and computer vision. Currently, he’s actively pursuing projects in the field of action recognition and human pose estimation.

Maja Pantic

Scientific and technological advisor (Imperial College London)

Maja Pantic is Professor in Affective & Behavioral Computing in the VIP section, DoC, chairing the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group. She leads the Imperial College team, whose expertise relevant to the scientific and technological challenges that the DE-ENIGMA project aims to address, concerns vision-based and multimodal human facial behaviour sensing, tracking, and understanding.

Jie Shen

Affect-sensitive human-robot interaction and cloud-based affective computing systems (Imperial College London)

Jie Shen is a Research Associate at Department of Computing, Imperial College London. He mainly works on the software and hardware infrastructure for multi-modal human-computer/robot interaction (HCI/HRI) systems. His work, the HCI^2 Framework, has been used as the system integration framework in EU FP7 FROG and EU FP7 TERESA projects.

Teresa Ng

Finance and Research Manager (Imperial College London)

Teresa Ng is the Finance and Research Manager for the iBUG team and project manager for H2020 SEWA.

Christos Georgakis

Dynamic behavior and affect analysis (Imperial College London)

Christos Georgakis is a PhD student/Research Assistant within the iBUG group, Department of Computing, Imperial College London. His research focuses on mathematical optimization and machine learning models for dynamic behavior and affect prediction as well as behavior similarity estimation.

Robert Walecki

Analysis of human facial behavior (Imperial College London)

Robert Walecki is a PhD student at Computing Dept., Imperial College London (ICL). His research is mainly concerned with design and development of context-sensitive machine learning models for analysis of human facial behavior.

Zuwei Li

DE-ENIGMA partner (Imperial College London)

Zuwei Li is a part time Research Assistant at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London (ICL).  His research interests are deep learning techniques in audio visual speech recognition.

Linh Tran

DE-ENIGMA partner (Imperial College London)

Linh Tran is a Research Assistant and PhD student at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London (ICL). Her research interests lie in the area of machine learning and computer vision, with special focus on generative and probabilistic modelling and their applications to human behaviour analysis.

Yujiang Wang

DE-ENIGMA partner (Imperial College London)

Yujiang Wang is a Research Assistant and PhD student at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London (ICL).  His main interests are audiovisual human behaviour analysis and biometrics and behaviometrics.

Ruben Vereecken

DE-ENIGMA partner (Imperial College London)

Ruben Vereecken is a Research Assistant and PhD student at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London (ICL). With a history in reinforcement learning, his current interests lie with computer vision with a focus on modelling human behaviour while enforcing interpretability.

Sebastian Kaltwang

Recognition of subtle facial movement (Imperial College London)

Dr. Sebastian Kaltwang is a Research Associate at the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group (iBUG) at Imperial College London, working on machine learning and computer vision for automated human non-verbal behaviour analysis. He develops probabilistic graphical models and multiple kernel learning methods for recognition of subtle facial movements (facial action units) from video, which serve as intermediate step towards the recognition of emotions from facial expressions.

Stavros Petridis

DE-ENIGMA partner (Imperial College London)

Stavros Petridis is a Research Fellow at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London (ICL). His main expertise is in the areas of machine learning and especially deep neural networks, computer vision and audiovisual fusion and their application to multimodal recognition of human behaviour. He is currently working on deep learning models for audiovisual fusion, visual speech recognition / lipreading and unsupervised / predictive learning.

Stefanos Eleftheriadis

DE-ENIGMA partner (Imperial College London)

Stefanos Eleftheriadis is a Research Assistant in the Computing Department of Imperial College London, U.K., working in the ibug group under Prof. Maja Pantic’s supervision. His research interests lie in the area of Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Digital Signal Processing with applications in Affective Computing and HCI.

Ognjen Rudovic

Key researcher in the DE-ENIGMA project (Imperial College London)

Ognjen Rudovic is a Research Fellow at Computing Dept., Imperial College London (ICL). His research is mainly concerned with design and development of context-sensitive machine learning models for analysis of human facial behaviour.

Zukang Liao

DE-ENIGMA partner (Imperial College London)

Zukang Liao is a Research Assistant and PhD student at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London (ICL). His research interests are computer vision and machine learning, especially deep neural networks for age, gender, action units, facial expression and emotion recognition

Shiyang Cheng

Assistant in experiment data collection (Imperial College London)

Shiyang Cheng is a Research Assistant in the Department of Computing, Imperial College London (ICL). His research interests lie in the Facial landmark detection/tracking and facial motion extraction.

Markos Georgopoulos

DE-ENIGMA partner (Imperial College London)

Markos Georgopoulos is a Research Assistant and PhD student at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London (ICL). His research interests lie in the area of machine learning and computer vision, with special focus on facial behaviometrics, and data-driven learning and tracking of soft biometrics.

Sunčica Petrović

Team leader for the DE-ENIGMA project (Serbian Society of Autism)

Sunčica Petrović has been engaged in SSA since 1999, and is responsible for project coordination, international relations, media and communication. She has a brother with autism.

Vesna Petrović

Scientific advisor – therapist for the DE-ENIGMA project (Serbian Society of Autism)

Engaged in SSA since 1983, Vesna Petrović is  the President of the SSA Managing Board since 2010. A Board member of the Serbian national organization for people with disabilities, and a member of Autism Europe Council of Administration. She has a 37 year old son with autism.

Milica Pejovic Milovancevic M.D.

DE-ENIGMA scientific advisor, psychiatrist 

Head of Clinic for Children and Adolescents, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at School of Medicine (University of Belgrade), member of ESCAP Board. Experienced researcher and educator with specialization in child psychiatry , 210 scientific and professional papers and abstracts: peer reviewed journals (international 15, national 18), abstracts (international 67, national 65) and 2 books.

Snežana Babović Dimitrijevic

Scientific advisor – therapist for the DE-ENIGMA project (Serbian Society of Autism)

Snežana Babović Dimitrijevic has been a special educational therapist, speech therapist, and psychomotor learning educator for teaching children and people with ASC for more than 25 years. She has co-authored more than 20 works in the field.

Teodora Mincic

DE-ENIGMA scientific advisor, clinical psychologist

Specialization in medical psychology, works as a forensyc psychologist for courts in the cases involving children and families for the past 10 years. Psychologist at the Department for children and adolescents in Institute for mental health in Belgrade since 1996. Member of the Department for child protection in Institut for mental health since 2000.

Sandra Skendzic

DE-ENIGMA therapist

For the past 18 years working as a classroom teacher for children with autism in special school in Belgrade. Participated in a number of projects, author and educator of 3 accredited seminars for teachers who work with children with autism.

Jelena Radosavljev Kircanski

PhD- DE-ENIGMA scientific advisor, clinical psychologist

Experienced researcher and educator, with more than 30 national and international publications from the field.

Nenad Rudic M.D.

DE-ENIGMA scientific advisor, psychiatrist

Continuously involved in different aspects of care for children with mental health problems and their families: clinical work dedicated to appropriate assessment and treatment of developmental disorders in preschool and school children, educational activities with primary health care pediatricians and home visiting nurses (CHW) in the field of early development, active cooperation with community health services in providing appropriate care for children with developmental risks and difficulties and research projects (national and international) aimed at improvement and assessment of intervention in this field. Subspecialty training in Psychiatry and Neurology of Developmental Age. Head of Day Hospital for Children with Developmental Disorders, IDPA (International Developmental Pediatrics Association) Executive Board member.

Björn Schuller

PI of the Augsburg University’s team in the DE-ENIGMA project (University of Augsburg)

Björn Schuller is best known for his works on Machine Intelligence for Computer Audition and Affective Computing.He is Augsburg University’s Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing positions itself at the intersection of modern Computer Science and Medicine.

The chair pursues research in the field of computationally intelligent, ubiquitous sensing for knowledge-based monitoring of health-related activity, vital parameters, wellbeing, and contextual factors. The primary interest lies on robust multi-sensorial capturing, analysis, and interpretation of bio-signals such as cardio-, metabolic, or neuro-signals; moreover, modelling acoustic (from speech and non-speech) and visual (from face, gesture, and body) information with an integrated approach, in everyday (“in the wild”) environments, for mHealth and Affective Computing. For optimal individual user benefit and experience, this is complemented by socio-emotionally competent user modelling, feedback generation, interfaces, and applications for digital solutions of health state, fitness monitoring, and sports-related coaching. To best fulfil these goals, the chair develops novel algorithms in the fields of deep and general machine learning, and robust signal processing.

Anton Batliner

Cross-linguistic aspects of prosody and computational paralinguistics (University of Augsburg)

Anton Batliner‘s main research interests are all (cross-linguistic) aspects of prosody and (computational) paralinguistics. He repeatedly served as co-organiser for Workshops/Sessions/Challenges on emotion and other paralinguistic events at LREC, ICPhS, Speech Prosody, and Interspeech. He was guest editor for AHCI, CSL, and Speech Communication, Associated Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, as well as reviewer for numerous leading journals, conferences, and workshops.                   

Jun Deng

Development of DE-ENIGMA automatic speech analysis and affect sensing in spontaneous speech and real-life (University of Passau)

Jun Deng received his bachelor degree (2009) in electronic and information engineering from Harbin Engineering University (HEU) and his master degree (2011) in information and communication engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), Heilongjiang/China, and his doctoral degree (2016) for his study on Feature Transfer Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition, in electrical engineering and information technology from TUM, Germany. He was a postdoctoral researcher from 2015 to 2017 at the Chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems at the University of Passau in Passau/Germany. Currently, he is a Leader Researcher at audEERING, where he focus on conducting fundamental research towards design and development of cutting edge technology for wide range of affective computing applications. His interests are machine learning methods such as transfer learning and deep learning with an application preference to affective computing.

Nicholas Cummins

Development of DE-ENIGMA automatic speech analysis and affect sensing in spontaneous speech and real-life (University of Augsburg)

Dr. Nicholas Cummins has a BEng (1st Class Honours) in Electrical Engineering from UNSW Australia and was awarded a PhD in Electrical Engineering, also from from UNSW Australia, in February 2016. His PhD investigated whether the voice can be used as an objective marker in the diagnosis and monitoring of clinical depression.  He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems at University of Augsburg where he is involved in the EU-FP7 starting grant project iHEARu and the Horizon 2020 project DE-ENIGMA.

His research interest include affective and behavioural computing with a focus on the automatic analysis, detection and understanding of clinical and neurological disorders. He has published regularly in the field of depression detection since 2011; these papers have attracted significant attention and citations. He reviews for regularly IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, Computer Speech & Language and Speech Communication. Previous to starting his degree he worked for eight years as an electrician in Australia, the UK and Ireland.

Erik Marchi

Development of DE-ENIGMA automatic speech analysis and affect sensing in spontaneous speech and real-life (University of Augsburg)

Erik Marchi is currently working towards his PhD degree as a researcher in the Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing Group at the Institute for Human-Machine Communication of Technische Universtität München, one of Germany’s Excellence Universities. His research focuses on affective computing, speech recognition and music information retrieval. He is leader of the development of DE-ENIGMA automatic speech analysis and affect sensing in spontaneous speech and real-life acoustic environments of typically developing individuals and those with autism.

Bogdan Vlasenko

DE-ENIGMA partner (University of Passau)

Bogdan Vlasenko received the M.Sc. in Computer Science from National Technical University of Ukraine (Kiev, Ukraine) in 2006, and his doctoral degree from the Chair Cognitive systems
at Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Magdeburg, Germany). Previously, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Idiap Research Institute (Martigny, Switzerland) from 2015 to 2016.
Currently, he is a Research Associate at the Chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems, University of Passau (Passau, Germany). His main research interests are: Affective Speech Processing, Automatic Speech Recognition, Signal Processing, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. He is a reviewer for various publications, including the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, IEEE Signal Processing Letters and Elsevier Computer Speech and Language.

Gerhard Hagerer

Developer and industrial partner for audio-based deep denoising, speech separation, and emotion recognition (University of Augsburg)

He is doing a PhD with a focus on industrial applications of audio-based Machine Learning, speech analysis and audio processing. Therefore he is not only employed by the University of Augsburg, but also by audEERING GmbH, a startup company located nearby Munich. At the moment he is interested in Deep Neural Network based Denoising, Speech Enhancement and Source Separation. These techniques are currently needed by the DE-ENIGMA project.

Alice Baird

Data collection, annotation (vocal and linguistic cues). (University of Augsburg)

Alice Baird is a research assistant and PhD candidate at the Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing, Augsburg University. From an interdisciplinary background, in the arts and technology, her research is centered around audio. Predominately in the realm of intelligent audio analysis, with a particular interest in paralinguistics of speech. Alice Baird has an MFA in Sound Arts from Columbia University and a BA in Music Technology from London Metropolitan University.