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We are happy to welcome Mr. Enrique Hortal  who has joined our lab in order to hold a key position in the MaTHiSiS EU project. He will work on research issues related to robots, emotion and personalization in education.

Our ThinkSlim project paper “An Ecological Momentary Intervention for weight loss and healthy eating via smartphone and Internet: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial” describing our ensemble of psychology, machine learning and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) methods is accepted for publication in Trials Journal. You can find it here.

In January, 2016, two new, large-scale, collaborative H2020 projects were launched within Maastricht University – Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering (DKE). The projects are co-funded by the EU and bring together Universities, industrial players and policy makers for the development of innovative products and the promotion of research in the areas of health and education.

MaTHiSiS (€7.6m total project funding) is a Horizon2020-ICT-20-2015 Innovation project. It will develop innovative educational tools for learning in formal and informal settings, placing learner’s emotion in the core of the learning procedure. Hereby applying cutting-edge analytics and Artificial Intelligence techniques for efficient, personalised learning. MaTHiSiS will make use of robots, mobile devices and interactive boards in mainstream, special and vocational learning contexts. DKE, in MaTHiSiS, will have a central role in the fields of Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analysis and Serious Game Design and will collaborate with 18 EU partners in the project.

ICT4Life (€3.4m total project funding) Horizon2020-PHC-25-2015 Research & Innovation project will develop ambient-assisted living instruments and smart interfaces for the elderly and their caregivers. The project will mainly focus on people with Dementia, Alzheimer and Parkinson’s disease who are still living independently. To that aim, ICT4Life, through Maastricht University, will work on smart sensors able to detect anomalies in human activities and smart interfaces for the elderly to report and receive feedback from their doctors and families. The project brings together 9 partners from Europe.

Contact: Dr Stylianos (Stelios) Asteriadis, Assistant Professor at the Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering – Principal investigator in MaTHiSiS and ICT4Life for UM. E-mail: stelios.asteriadis@maastrichtuniversity.nl

We are happy to welcome Mr. Esam Ghaleb and Mr Christos Athanasiadis who have joined our lab to work with us on artificial intelligence and emotion recognition in learning environments. Their works will be part of the MaTHiSiS EU H2020 project and their research will lead to highly personalized and user-centered interfaces for education!

Our paper “Associating gesture expressivity with affective representations” (L. Malatesta, S. Asteriadis, G. Caridakis, K. Karpouzis, A. Vasalou), which is a joint work among the Univ. of Maastricht (NL), UCL (UK), and NTUA (GR) has been accepted for publication

We are happy to welcome Mr. Dario Dotti who has joined our lab to work with us on human activity recognition in indoor environments. His work will be part of the ICT4Life EU H2020 project and his research will contribute to a better life for the elderly suffering from mental disorders. Our best wishes to Dario!

Our paper with title “AMSOM: Adaptive Moving Self-organizing Map for Clustering and Visualization” will be presented at ICAART 2016 (International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence), taking place in Rome.

Our thinkslim project paper with title: “Network analysis of Ecological Momentary Assessment data for monitoring and understanding eating behavior” has been accepted for publication to the International Conference for Smart Health 2015 (ICSH 2015).

Also, our paper with title: “Flexible Deep Neural Network structure with application to Natural Language Processing” has been accepted for publication to the 27th Benelux International Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2015 (BNAIC 2015). This paper was based on the thesis work of our MSc student Christopher Wittlinger.

We present the Platformer Experience Dataset (PED) — the first open-access  game experience corpus — that contains multiple modalities of user data of Super Mario Bros players. The open-access database aims to be used for player experience capture through context based (i.e. game content), behavioral and visual recordings of platform game players. Click here for details, download instructions and citations.

A joint work involving the University of Maastricht, the National Technical University of Athens, the University of Malta and IT University of Copenhagen will be presented at the 6th international conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interactions. More details can be found here