Dr. I. (Iulia) Lefter

Dr. I. (Iulia) Lefter

Research interests

Iulia Lefter is Associate Professor at Delft University of Technology. She has a background in affective computing, a field of AI looking into how machines can perceive and respond to human emotions and affect-related behaviours. Her research focuses on designing and developing Affect-Sensitive Systems: systems that are aware of and adapt to human affect, in order to better support them in achieving their goals. Application domains of interest include mental, social and physical well-being, human-media interaction, education, enhancing human-human interaction or human performance in specific tasks such as negotiation, and serious games.

In her work, Iulia is devising models that automatically sense affective states of people and other behaviours of interest depending on an application. She does that by analysing data from various cues, as for example verbal and non-vebal behaviour and bio-signals, and investigates how information from these signals can be best intepreted together in a meaningful way by multimodal fusion. Further, she explores design opportunities together with relevant stakeholders, studying how to ensures a meaningful interaction between the user and the system. This means that the system supports users in reaching their goals, it is useful and acceptable to them. 

Background

Iulia Lefter is with the Multi-Actors Systems department at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) of TU Delft. Before joining TPM Iulia was a postdoctoral researcher (TUDelft, EEMCS), working on an interdisciplinary project to support psychiatric patients manage their aggressive tendencies using VR therapy, and on a European project aiming to help people who are physically apart feel more connected. Her PhD research (TUDelft, TNO, NLDA) focused on multimodal sensor fusion to better perceive human behaviour and affective states.

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Publications