I am professor of digital cultures in development at Maastricht University and senior researcher with the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands. I have been studying various social and political issues around digital technologies since the mid-1980s.

There are two main strands to our current research. The first concerns the role of digital technologies in the production of knowledge in the humanities and the social sciences. Our group goes beyond the development of new computational tools to ask questions about interdisciplinary collaboration, the involvement of new social groups in the production of knowledge, and the conceptualisation of openness in debates about open access to publications and to data.

The second strand focuses on the ways in which people incorporate the internet and social media into their practices for finding health information. Most recently, we have examined the emergence of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, especially in relation to issues of trust, participation, and genetic and digital determinism.

Both strands of work have resulted in many publications, and recently a book: Anna Harris, Susan Kelly & Sally Wyatt, CyberGenetics. Health Genetics and New Media, published in 2016 by Routledge.

As professor of digital heritage my research focuses on the preservation and reuse of cultural heritage in a rapidly digitizing world. Heritage is our 'cultural DNA'. Material objects such as everyday objects, monuments, and architecture and immaterial forms of heritage such as values, ideas, and ritual practices are the essential building blocks of local, national, or transnational identities. Just as much as today's genetics may work to the benefit of physical health, understanding the interactions between cultural heritage and identities contributes substantially to the quality of individual life and society. My research specifically focuses on the impact of digitization on cultural heritage as a source of knowledge, information and identification, by mapping the implications for long-term preservation (as in the Marie Curie ITN project New Approaches for the Conservation of Contemporary Art), access and reuse and by defining the digital literacy required to make sense of it.

The opportunities to engage with the growing amount of heritage in digital form, both digitized and 'born-digital', as well as the tooling for retrieving, analyzing and visualizing it, are explored in the Creative Amsterdam project which I lead as part of my directorate of the University of Amsterdam's research priority area Cultural Heritage and Identity. Besides opportunities this 'Big Historical Data' research also presents challenges for research methods and practices, which we address in designing the national, NWO-funded infrastructure for digital humanities research CLARIAH. The work package on audiovisual data and media studies that I lead specifically focuses on improving the transparency of data and tools, in order to promote responsible historical data science.

Within the Amsterdam Data Science initiative I participate in a project that assesses the quality of online data as sources of information and knowledge. Through a combination of machine learning and human evaluation of sources we aim to establish the basis for tools that allow users to determine the quality of online sources and to evaluate the perspectives embedded in them. The outcome not only supports the uptake of online data in research but also serves as the basis for services that promote informed decision making in the fields of consumption, health, politics and education. As such, my research contributes to the critical framework required for informed, responsible citizenship in a datafied society.

The research in the Human Computer Interaction group revolves around the idea of using forms of communication that come naturally to people. From a computational perspective, this involves developing algorithms to understand all the input a user provides, trying to recognize the actions, goals and emotions of the user by both rule-based and data driven techniques. This research started by looking at speech and language but currently includes sensing the complete behaviour; from nonverbal expressions such as facial expressions or posture, to physiological measures.

There is a long history of working on natural language dialogue systems that take the form of virtual humans and more recently, social robots in which artificial intelligence components add the notion of autonomy and decision making and speech, language and nonverbal communication. But besides the research into dialogue, we also use the techniques of sensing and interpretation for the extraction of information from video and speech archives (for instance in the context of oral history and cultural heritage projects) or their potential in ambient settings (for instance changing the lighting of a room depending on the mood of the people present that is detected by the affective computing software).

The research is conducted in a very multidisciplinary setting. The research group consists of researchers with backgrounds in computer science, mathematics, electrical engineering, psychology and linguistics. Several researchers have double degrees. Collaboration between disciplines is needed for several reasons. The development of algorithms requires the understanding of the domain: in this case the human user. But also, measuring the effects of the interactive technology on the user requires a thorough mastery of user studies involving a wide range of methods - from ethnomethodology to experimental studies.

The potential impact of the research is very broad. Here are some examples. In a recent project we are studying the automatic analysis of speech to see whether it can help in the diagnosis of demention. In several other projects we have investigated the use of virtual humans and robots to train communication skills through serious games; e.g. training police officers in interviewing skills or teaching children with autism about facial expressions. Besides training particular skills, we have worked on coaching; for instance coaching young children with diabetes on how to deal with this. Very different projects involve providing researchers or the general public access to multimedia repositories by automatically enriching the repositories with meta-data.

My group focuses on increasing access to knowledge through large scale information extraction from text. By developing computational lexicons and knowledge graphs from text we bring human language technology to a higher level. Our project NewsReader developed the 'History Recorder', a computer program that 'reads' the news each day and precisely records what happened when and where in the world and who was involved. Furthermore we developed 4 research projects with the Spinoza-prize: 'Understanding of Language by Machines – an escape from the world of language'.

How can people be motivated to act sustainably? How can you give young people more control over their behavior? How are citizens involved in making decisions about their city? Such societal issues are far-reaching and urgent, but activating people and keeping them engaged is a challenge. Games have the potential to contribute to these and other major societal issues. Games are designed experiences, players learn by doing, taking decisions, and experiencing consequences in a safe and stimulating environment. It is our mission to employ games to help solve major societal challenges. Games are eminently suited to informing, motivating, appealing to emotion, and influencing attitudes and behavior.

Our research concerns the development of new techniques for persuasion and engagement, building virtual environments and avatars, and technology-mediated interaction. In addition, we perform research on the application of games in three domains: games for education, games for health, games for change.

Games for education

Including games for children, higher education, and professional skills. Examples of research projects are the use of games to develop number sense with children, and training pharmacists in communication skills.

Games for health

e.g. healthy living, well-being, rehabilitation. Our research includes game-based enhancement of behavior control, training stroke patients in a virtual reality environment, and stimulating the development of chronically ill children.

Games for change

e.g. for sustainability, social inclusion, smart cities, conflict, and security. We perform research, for example, on playful cities, and how games can be used for energy saving.