Staff

Ir. I. (Iulia) Lefter

Contact

Room: 31.B1.250

Profile

Iulia Lefter is Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology, where she is researching Affect-Sensitive Systems: systems that are aware of and adapt to users' affective states and behaviours, in order to better support them in achieving their goals. Applications domains of interest include mental and physical health and wellbeing, 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, as for example their verbal and nonverbal behaviour. She does that by analysing data from various signals (e.g. audio, video, physiological), 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 adaptation can best support users, as well as the interaction and interdependencies in-between sensing and desing. In her reaseach, Iulia combines her background in computer science with her interest in psychology and design, and is greatly inspired by interdisciplinary work.

Academic background

Iulia Lefter is Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) . 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.

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.

More academic background