The University of Twente

The new faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences is investing more and more in employing computational and other technological methods in their research. The Tech4People program that is currently running supports the collaboration between the BMS faculty and the technology-based faculties. It also support new developments in Computational Social Science. Topics include new technologies for monitoring and analyzing large groups, gathering data using sociometric badges and other sensors. Sentiment analysis is used for exploring narratives in mental health care, for example, and analyzing political debates.

The Human Media Interaction group in the faculty of Computer Science has a long standing tradition in computational linguistics in both analysis and generation (embodied dialogue systems). Human interaction with large multimedia collections relies on the automated content analysis for indexing and annotation purposes. The group researches models for the automatic analysis of data by exploiting the synergy between information retrieval, speech and language processing, and database technology. Application domains range from cultural heritage and biomedicine, to print, broadcast and social media.

The group collaborates extensively with researchers in the BMS faculty, partly by developing tools to support scholarly work in various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, based on the automatic analysis of text and speech but also nonverbal communication. Examples include improving search and navigation tools for oral history, classification of folktales and online narratives or the analyis of nonverberbal behaviours in conversations using motion capture and other technologies in the field of social signal processing