Herwin van Welbergen

I have received my MSc in computer science and my PhD in Human Media Interaction from the University of Twente. I have been a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Cognitive Systems group at the Center of Excellence ‘Cognitive Interaction Technology’ and Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University. Currently I'm employed as a Senior Data Scientist.

Research interests

Currently, I'm interested in applying machine learning to solve industry challenges, including the application of deep learning, active learning and reinforcement learning. This includes employing this methods in a stable manner in industry systems and monitoring, testing and visualizing their long term (financial) success.

In my PhD and Postdoctoral research I have looked at teaching machines to do something similar to human conversation. Human conversations are highly dynamic, responsive interactions. In such interactions, utterances are produced incrementally, subject to on-the-fly adaptation and (self) interruptions. I have employed both rule-based and later on data-driven methods to achieve aspects of fluent behavior generation for virtual humans.