Christian Mühl received his PhD in 2012 for his research on the methodological and neurophysiological foundations of neurophysiology-based sensing of affective user states at the Human-Media Interaction group of the University of Twente (NL). From 2013 to 2014, he worked at Inria Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest (FR) on the detection of stress and workload from physiological and neurophysiological signals. Currently, he is post-doctoral fellow at the German Aerospace Center in Cologne (DE), where he investigates the influence of fatigue on the cognitive performance and its physiological correlates. His main interests include the estimation of affective and cognitive user state from physiological and neurophysiological sensors to improve man-machine interaction, the study of signal variability due to context-dependent affective responses frequently occurring in real-world settings, and the development of strategies to overcome the challenges associated with such context-dependent variability of physiological signals.

After his studies of Linguistics, Computer Science, and Computational Linguistics at the University of Antwerp Dirk Heylen 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 (a.k.a. virtual agents or embodied conversational agents). This made my 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. He has been involved in several European projects such as Humaine, AMI and AMIDA, COST 2102, Semaine, SSPNET, and SERA. 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. Current Dutch national projects he is involved in include BrainGain in which neural correlates of a user’s experience are explored for Human Computer Interaction using Brain Computing Interfaces and GATE dealing with cognitive models of virtual agents in training applications.

Anton Nijholt started his professional life as a scientific programmer at TNO, Rijswijk, the Netherlands. He studied mathematics and computer science at Delft University of Technology and moved to live in Amsterdam and do his PhD in theoretical computer science at the Vrije Universiteit. After that he was employed at several universities in and outside the Netherlands before 'settling down' at the University of Twente in 1989 as a full professor. He became head of the department Software Engineering and Theoretical Computer Science and, shortly thereafter, the Faculty of Computer Science before changing his research interests from theoretical computer science to natural language processing and, after the year 2000, to human-computer interaction. He initiated the Human Media Interaction research group and this group took part in many Dutch and European research projects on multimodal and multi-party interaction, information retrieval and brain-computer interfacing. Nijholt is author and editor of several books and proceedings on entertainment computing, playful user interfaces, affective computing and brain-computer interfacing.