World's Best Scientists 2026 revealed!

D-Index & Metrics

Engineering and Technology

D-Index
40
Citations
6754
World Ranking
7292
National Ranking
144

Overview

Dirk Heylen is affiliated with the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Their research spans multiple fields, predominantly in computer science and psychology, with a significant focus on social psychology, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical psychology.

Their work covers several key research topics, including:

  • Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts
  • Action Observation and Synchronization
  • Social Robot Interaction and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder Research
  • Tactile and Sensory Interactions
  • AI in Service Interactions
  • Gaze Tracking and Assistive Technology

Heylen has contributed to research published in various academic venues. Frequent publication venues include:

  • ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
  • International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
  • JMIR Formative Research
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
  • Proceedings of the IEEE

Their recent papers illustrate a broad engagement with topics related to human-robot interaction, virtual reality, and addictive disorder treatments. Notable recent publications include:

  • "Differences in Spontaneous Interactions of Autistic Children in an Interaction With an Adult and Humanoid Robot," 2020, Frontiers in Robotics and AI
  • "Clinical Relevance of Immersive Virtual Reality in the Assessment and Treatment of Addictive Disorders: A Systematic Review and Future Perspective," 2021, Journal of Clinical Medicine
  • "Touch Technology in Affective Human-, Robot-, and Virtual-Human Interactions: A Survey," 2023, Proceedings of the IEEE
  • ""I See What You Did There"," 2021, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
  • "Immersive Virtual Reality Avatars for Embodiment Illusions in People With Mild to Borderline Intellectual Disability: User-Centered Development and Feasibility Study," 2022, JMIR Serious Games

Heylen collaborates regularly with several researchers, including:

  • Randy Klaassen
  • Bob R. Schadenberg
  • Dennis Reidsma
  • Vanessa Evers
  • Sara Falcone

Across their career, Heylen has contributed a substantial body of work integrating psychological theories with technological developments, notably focusing on the intersection of human behavior and interactive systems such as virtual environments and robots.

Best Publications

  • Bridging the Gap between Social Animal and Unsocial Machine: A Survey of Social Signal Processing

    Alessandro Vinciarelli;M. Pantic;D. Heylen;C. Pelachaud

  • Building Autonomous Sensitive Artificial Listeners

    M. Schroder;E. Bevacqua;R. Cowie;F. Eyben

  • The virtual storyteller: Story creation by intelligent agents

    Mariet Theune;S. Faas;Dirk K.J. Heylen;Antinus Nijholt

  • Dominance detection in meetings using easily obtainable features

    Rutger Rienks;Dirk Heylen

  • Brain-Computer Interfacing and Games

    Danny Plass-Oude Bos;Boris Reuderink;Bram van de Laar;Hayrettin Gürkök

  • The TaSSt: Tactile sleeve for social touch

    G. Huisman;Aduen Darriba Frederiks;B. Van Dijk;D. Hevlen

  • Generating expressive speech for storytelling applications

    M. Theune;K. Meijs;D. Heylen;R. Ordelman

  • The Sensitive Artificial Listner: an induction technique for generating emotionally coloured conversation

    Ellen Douglas-Cowie;Roddy Cowie;Cate Cox;Noam Amier

  • First impressions: users' judgments of virtual agents' personality and interpersonal attitude in first encounters

    Angelo Cafaro;Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson;Timothy Bickmore;Dirk Heylen

  • HEAD GESTURES, GAZE AND THE PRINCIPLES OF CONVERSATIONAL STRUCTURE

    Dirk K.J. Heylen

  • Social Signal Processing: The Research Agenda

    Maja Pantic;Maja Pantic;Roderick Cowie;Francesca D'Errico;Dirk K.J. Heylen

  • Open Challenges in Modelling, Analysis and Synthesis of Human Behaviour in Human–Human and Human–Machine Interactions

    Alessandro Vinciarelli;Anna Esposito;Elisabeth André;Francesca Bonin

  • The Next Step towards a Function Markup Language

    Dirk Heylen;Stefan Kopp;Stacy C. Marsella;Catherine Pelachaud

  • Human-Computer Interaction for BCI Games: Usability and User Experience

    Danny Plass-Oude Bos;Boris Reuderink;Bram van de Laar;Hayrettin Gurkok

  • Challenges ahead: head movements and other social acts during conversations

    D.K.J. Heylen

  • Content validity and internal consistency of the Dutch translation of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire: An observational study

    Els Devriendt;Koen Van den Heede;Joke Coussement;Eddy Dejaeger

  • Collaborative Practices that Support Creativity in Design

    Dhaval Vyas;Dirk K.J. Heylen;Antinus Nijholt;Gerrit C. van der Veer

  • How turn-taking strategies influence users' impressions of an agent

    Mark Ter Maat;Khiet P. Truong;Dirk Heylen

  • ICMI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction}

    Khiet P. Truong;Dirk Heylen;Mary Czerwinski;Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze

  • Bacteria Hunt: Evaluating multi-paradigm BCI interaction

    Christian Mühl;Hayrettin Gürkök;Danny Plass-Oude Bos;Marieke E. Thurlings

  • Perception of non-verbal emotional listener feedback

    Marc Schröder;Dirk K.J. Heylen;Isabella Poggi

  • A rule-based backchannel prediction model using pitch and pause information

    Khiet Phuong Truong;Ronald Walter Poppe;Dirk K.J. Heylen

Frequent Co-Authors

Anton Nijholt
Anton Nijholt University of Twente
Mannes Poel
Mannes Poel University of Twente
Catherine Pelachaud
Catherine Pelachaud Sorbonne University
Vanessa Evers
Vanessa Evers Nanyang Technological University
Maja Pantic
Maja Pantic Imperial College London
Björn Schuller
Björn Schuller Imperial College London
Roddy Cowie
Roddy Cowie Queen's University Belfast
Alessandro Vinciarelli
Alessandro Vinciarelli University of Glasgow
Martin Wöllmer
Martin Wöllmer Technical University of Munich
Michel Valstar
Michel Valstar University of Nottingham

If you think any of the details on this page are incorrect, let us know.

Report an issue

We appreciate your kind effort to assist us to improve this page, it would be helpful providing us with as much detail as possible in the text box below:

Best Scientists Citing Dirk Heylen

Trending Scientists

Recently Published Articles