Joost Broekens
Associate Professor Affective Computing And Human Robot Interaction
Zoeterwoude, South Holland, Netherlands
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolJoost Broekens is an Associate Professor specializing in affective computing, human-robot interaction and AI, with over a decade of experience bridging academic research and product engineering. He leads research at Leiden University while co-founding and driving technology for startups (Interactive Robotics, daisys.ai) focused on cloud robotics and naturally expressive speech systems. His work spans reinforcement learning, virtual agents, gaming research and style-based speech tech, combining cognitive-science–grounded PhD expertise with hands-on software engineering. Notably, he has translated computational models of emotion—such as using facial expressions to influence robot learning—into commercial HRI and cloud robotics products. Based in the Netherlands, he blends scholarly rigor with entrepreneurial execution to move digital emotion technology from lab prototypes to deployed systems.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Psychology, PhD, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Psychology at Leiden UniversityMSc, Software engineering, artificial intelligence, MSc, Software engineering, artificial intelligence at Delft University of Technology
French, English, Dutch, German
Github Skills (4)
emotion7
phaser6
java1
javascript1
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
broekens/gamygdala
Feb 2015 - Mar 2016
Emotion engine for games including Phaser plugin, based on the Gamygdala approach (with an eyewink to game and amygdala)
Contributions:34 commits, 5 PRs, 33 pushes in 1 year 1 month
emotionphaser-plugingamesapproachphaser
RoboTutor/palRoboTutorProject
Jun 2016 - Jul 2016
Contributions:4 pushes, 1 branch in 23 days
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