I am a professor in Computer Science at Hasselt University, member of the Intelligible Interactive Systems and the Data Intelligence and Computation research units of the research institute Expertise centre for Digital Media – a Flanders Make core lab, and deputy director (2016-now) of the same research institute. I acted as a Flanders Make core lab manager (2018-2021) for Hasselt University. I do research in Human-Computer Interaction.

My greatest accomplishment is the group of PhD students I guided, both as an advisor and co-advisor, and they were and are the biggest contributors for my own career.

I received both a M.Sc. in Knowledge Engineering and Computer Science from the transnational University Limburg, a joint university of Hasselt University, Belgium and Maastricht University, the Netherlands, in 2000. My PhD (2004) is in computer science from Hasselt University, Belgium where I am appointed as a professor since 2006.

I served as a co-chair for the CHI 2008 Work-in-Progress venue, was full paper co-chair for EICS 2011, EICS 2013, EICS 2022 and EICS 2023, general co-chair for EICS 2016 and EICS 2018, program chair for TAMODIA 2006, short paper co-chair for AMI 2012 and an Associate Chair for CHI 2014. I am member of the editorial board of Interacting with Computers, Frontiers in ICT – Human-Media Interaction and the International Journal on People-Oriented Programming. Special issues I edited can be found in ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) (on interaction with smart objects), ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) (on UIDLs for Next-Generation User Interfaces) and International Journal on Web Engineering and Technology (on XML-Based User Interface Description Languages).

I was chairing the steering committee of ACM SIGCHI Engineering Interactive Computing Systems conference series (2017-2020), and am still a member of the EICS steering committee, and of the IFIP workgroup 2.7 User Interface Engineering. I was a member of the ACM SIGCHI conferences board until 2019.

I co-founded TinkerTouch (2009-2015), a company that used to build robust and high performance touch- and gesture-based user interfaces. We had a good run, but it didn’t last.