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About

Joost Broekens is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of affective computing, human-robot interaction, and artificial intelligence, whose work has fundamentally shaped how we understand emotional expression and social behavior in robotic systems. His most influential contribution, a 2009 review of assistive social robots in elderly care, has accumulated an remarkable 935 citations, establishing him as a leading authority on the psychological and health benefits of socially intelligent robots for vulnerable populations. Broekens has made substantial theoretical and applied contributions to the computational modeling of emotion, particularly through reinforcement learning frameworks that simulate affective states such as joy, fear, hope, and distress. His research demonstrates that robots can not only express mood through parameterized body language but can also trigger genuine mood contagion in human interaction partners — a finding with profound implications for therapeutic and educational robotics. His applied work extends to child-centered healthcare, including a robotic partner designed for diabetes self-management, and to personalized robot explanation systems tailored to different age groups. Broekens also champions transparent robot learning, exploring how emotional expressions can make machine learning processes more interpretable to everyday users. Across these domains, his research consistently bridges cognitive science, emotional AI, and real-world human benefit.