Prof. dr. ir. Anton Nijholt - University of Twente, HMI, The Netherlands
Anton Nijholt has a background in human-computer interaction and entertainment computing. He is part of the Human Media Interaction group of the University of Twente, and is also involved with the Imagineering Institute in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. He has been program chair of the main international conferences on intelligent agents, multimodal interaction, affective computing, faces & gestures and entertainment computing. His recent (edited) books are on playful user interfaces, entertainment computing, and playable cities. In recent years he published many papers on humour and digital technology, in particular humour in smart environments.

Email: anijholt@cs.utwente.nl

Dr. Andreea I. Niculescu - Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R), Singapore
Andreea I. Niculescu works as a scientist at Institute for Infocomm Research, in the Human Language Technology department, Dialogue Technology Group. Her main interests are UX and interaction design focusing on user interface for speech and multimodal interactions. Her current research work is concerned with the use of humour for enhancing interactions with dialogue systems and social robots.

Email: andreea-n@i2r.a-star.edu.sg

Dr. Alessandro Valitutti - Università di Bari, Italy
Alessandro Valitutti is currently working as a senior researcher at the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Bari, Italy. He is involved in the SentiQuest Project, whose primary goal is to automatically detect irony and sarcasm in online Q&A websites and social networks. His past research activity was mainly on the computational treatment of emotions, creativity, and humour. Specifically, he developed ideas and resources for sentiment analysis and affect detection from texts, kinetic typography, humour generation, computational poetry, and fictional ideation. More recently, his interest is focusing on interactive humour.

Email: alessandro.valitutti@gmail.com

Dr. Rafael E. Banchs - Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R), Singapore
Rafael E. Banchs is currently the Head of the Dialogue Technology Group in the Human Language Technology department within the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore. His recent areas of research include Machine Translation, Information Retrieval, Cross-language Information Retrieval, Sentiment Analysis and Dialogue Systems. More specifically, he has been working on the application of vector space models along with linear and non-linear projection techniques to improve the quality of statistical machine translation and cross-language information retrieval systems, as well as on chatbots using humour as a mechanism to support error recovery.

Email: rembanchs@i2r.a-star.edu.sg